Dublin Rising
by StingInTheBackground
Summary: Kurt knew there was talk of revolution in Ireland. But he never expected to be caught in the rapids, or in the gaze of a certain hazel-eyed Irish rebel.
1. Chapter One

**Title**: Dublin Rising

**Author**: StingInTheBackground

**Genres**: Revolutionary Ireland AU, Romance, Action/Drama, Angst, Historical Fiction

**Warnings**: Violence, AU

**Characters**: Kurt/Blaine with a smattering of others

**A/N**: Historical notes on my LiveJournal.

* * *

_It would be so easy to attribute this mess of a rebellion to recklessness, or sheer stupidity. But there was nothing reckless about Blaine's confidence; it was angry but almost sad. So Kurt held out his hand instead. "I'm Kurt. Hummel."_

**Chapter One**

Kurt knew when he bought his round trip ticket that there were whispers of revolution in Ireland. When he walked through Dublin his first day there, he could feel it in the streets. But the weather was finally nice and he sang a bit as he strode along the main road to mail his next overseas letter. He couldn't have known that the Irish republicans had taken the post office.

_Dear Dad,_

_I won't hold it against you that you were right about London. And none of my friends invited me home for the holiday. I think any of their families would combust if their son brought home someone of the Oscar Wilde sort for Easter._

The classes at the Royal Academy of Music were in fact its one redeeming factor; the rest was a mix of big heads and narrow minds. But it was easy to make light of things on paper, and what was the point worrying his dad from four thousand miles away?

_I'm writing from a mostly clean tenement in Dublin. Not the glamorous vacation I'll be taking once I have private bookings and an overpaid agent, but for now it's as far as a pound and half sovereign will take me. So, my program..._

Dublin was nothing close to the places Kurt would find himself once people were paying inordinate amounts to study vocal music with _him_, not the other way around. For one thing, before today it was perpetually cloudy here – or maybe it was just April showers.

But Ireland was also a little eye-opening. Women in white shawls on the street, doing what exactly, he wasn't sure. Men soliciting better-dressed men for employment. Kurt was younger than most of them but his clothes were ironed, so he'd already had to decipher a variety of propositions in a variety of Irish accents – from the fluid lilts of girls who flirted, to the thicker brogue of the laborers, to the drawl of the young men who'd gone to school at some point.

"Copy of the terms of the Irish Republic, sir?"

"No thanks," Kurt said.

Things were nicer at the middle of commercial Sackville Street. He could let his guard down a little, a little more, and eventually he reached the upper town center, the condensed cross-section of Dublin.

From the outside the general post office simply looked busy, all bustle and bodies inside the windows' glare. Kurt hummed to himself, a song he sang with his friends back in America, as he approached the broad steps and Ionic columns. Even the portico was cavernous, made of granite and white marble. He knew from two days there that it normally sheltered a mid-day's shift of call girls, but not today. Even most of the pamphleteers were taking the morning off, so while Kurt could almost hear the business inside, mail and banking and telegraphs, the block outside was calm.

He took the steps one at a time, distractedly, double-checking the postage on his letter. A threefarthing's worth, to Lima from Dublin. _Baile Átha Cliath_, he'd learned. Hardly anyone actually seemed to speak Irish in the city, but it was on every damn sign as if they couldn't do without it.

Two boys in earth tones and grey were talking on the second step from the top, half under the shade of the portico. One of them was clearly in charge of whatever they were hatching, or maybe it just seemed that way because he had to be going on six feet tall. And Kurt lingered when he saw the other. Just for a moment.

Strictly speaking, nothing about him should have made Kurt pause from twenty feet away and take a second look. He wasn't tall, or quite as put-together as Kurt's type. The bow-tie was a nice touch, crooked between the lapels of his speckled jacket, and his hair was gelled in a style Kurt hadn't seen much of since leaving the States. There was a cap flopped out his back trouser pocket, pulling the material taut.

"We might as well go ahead, Wes," he was saying. Huh, when had Kurt gotten so close? "We should go ahead while we have the chance." Kurt barely even noticed the boy named Wes, he was so fixed on figuring out what it was about the short one. The eyes, he decided, and suddenly it seemed obvious. The boy moved down a few steps away from his friend and shielded his eyes as if he expected something from the street, but Kurt could see the hazel brown, underneath thick eyelashes. His expression was clear, alert.

"You want to tone it down," said a voice by Kurt's ear, making him jump. It was a monstrously tall young man, Kurt's age or thereabouts, wearing dark pants with a long red stripe and an official looking top. Not just official- militant. 'Capt. Smythe,' read the insignia on his thick white shirt, to the right of a line of red buttons. He was part of the royal army.

"Um, excuse me?"

Captain Smythe smirked towards the two boys but spoke to him. "I know he's pretty, but you'll get yourself into trouble." His diction reminded Kurt of every self-assured man in the London academy. Smythe glanced down at something in his own hand, a new book of stamps, and laughed to himself as if a thing so simple could be worth his derision. Then he raised the book so Kurt could see the Irish harp on the stamps, the cost printed in Celtic script. "That's a laugh," he said, "but you've got to hand it to them. Listen, guy, just go home."

"What, by royal decree? I have as much right to be here as you do."

"Not quite as much, Yank."

Kurt snorted. "Where's your red coat?"

"I lost it," he said simply. "And I'm just trying to warn you. He's pretty, but you'll get in trouble." He pocketed the stamps.

Kurt didn't like him and was prepared to tell him so, but then something was going on. The taller boy named Wes was speaking to the street. Smythe shrugged and moved away, pulling a half-apple from a brown bag. But Kurt noticed he certainly didn't go far; he kept an eye on the dark-haired boy who stood a few steps below his friend, in rapt attention but for a few anxious glances about them.

Kurt looked to Wes as well, who moved to the very top step, then one down out of the shadows, and produced an off-white paper from his jacket. He unrolled it and read aloud. "In this hour," he announced in a clear voice, "the loyal men of Ireland claim its independence, and their right to defend its life and livelihood."

He and the darker boy both glanced over Sackville Street. A woman slowed down to squint, then repositioned a basket under her arm and went about her way.

"We, the Irish volunteers, unite to preserve its dignity and to defend the Irish Republic from English tyranny by the taking up of arms." He looked to the milling Dubliners for a response, and got none. Only the usual sounds of the street.

He opened his mouth again, and shut it. Smythe stood off to the side, biting into his apple and waiting to see what he would do next. Even Kurt knew how hollow the words were, with no one to receive them. The Irish "Republic" was nothing; it didn't exist.

It was 1916, and Ireland had belonged to England for four hundred years.

Kurt chanced another look at the other boy whose name was probably none of his business. He'd turned half-way from Wes and towards the street, humming something with his eyes closed, mouthing words as if he was too nervous to remember them. Wes stepped away to the side, rolling the paper and watching the boy expectantly. Kurt realized with some confusion that he was about to sing.

And boy, did he. Slowly, at first.

_"Cois banta réidhe…."_

Kurt's jaw actually slackened.

_"Ar árdaibh séibhe."_

He couldn't have been formally trained – and Kurt knew training when he heard it, good or bad – but it couldn't have sounded sweeter if he had been. _"Ba bhuachach ár sinsir romhainn." _He was a tenor, pitch spot on but wavering finely under emotion that almost threatened to make his voice give out, reminding Kurt of nothing he'd ever heard in the States.

A couple stopped on the curb and shielded their eyes. Smythe tossed the apple core to the side and moved in, eyeing him. The boy's magnificent voice seemed to get a foothold on itself, and leapt upwards a notch. _"Ag lámhach go tréan fe'n sar-bhrat séin, Tá thuas sa ghaoith go seolta!"_

It was such a remote language, and every word was thick. But even the low vowels that came from deep in his throat were smooth when they hit the air. Whatever the hell was being said, it was obvious to Kurt that although this boy was the back-up plan, he was a good one. He had a small crowd, and now a larger one.

When he finished Wes gauged the group, before holding out the rolled up paper. The boy was sweating; it was after noon. He wiped his hands on his cropped pants and took it.

For a moment Kurt thought he was going to sing the rest, but he'd earned middle Sackville Street's attention; he cleared his throat again and continued speaking. "In the name…" he coughed once, "in the name of the dead generations from which we receive our old tradition of nationhood, Ireland summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom." The Irish in his English was muted; his accent – or rather, what was an accent to Kurt – didn't dominate the words. But it guided his phrasing up or down in a way Kurt wasn't accustomed to yet, just a sliding vowel here or a lilt at the end of a sentence like an unresolved suspension.

Wes had held the sheet at the top and bottom, like an announcer, projecting the end of each phrase the way Kurt used to in early acting classes. But this boy, whose slicked hair was starting to wave into a less confined shape in the sun, clenched both edges as if he were reading a single sheet of newspaper, eyes darting to his audience as if he could will them to care. The next few minutes were of flowered phrases that wouldn't have meant as much in a different vessel, without this boy who should have been off at a university, meeting girls.

Kurt cocked his head – _meeting guys?_ – and instantly felt his cheeks redden, ashamed.

The boy paused and stood up as tall as he could, which wasn't very, and didn't need the script for the crux of what he'd come to say. "Therefore, we proclaim the Irish Republic as an independent state," he ignored a ripple of sardonic laughter from the back, "and the right of the Irish people to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies." A couple eye rolls preceded a thinning out, as some of the stragglers in the back moved on, and a couple others strode out from the thick of the crowd purposefully, angrily. The boy didn't flinch; if anything he read more loudly, more clearly, nervous but steadfast.

The others stayed, impressed by his reverence for language, his awareness of the words that his colleague couldn't convey. As he neared the end his eyes raised from the sheet once and chanced upon Kurt's. "In this supreme hour the Irish nation must, with discipline, prove itself worthy of the destiny to which it's called."

It felt only natural to smile when their eyes met, but then Kurt realized that was weird, so he turned it into a look of encouragement. The boy nodded, satisfied, and when he finished he exhaled, looking back at the rest of the mass. _Oh,_ Kurt thought, _he thinks I'm Irish. He thinks I'm a convert._ Which made Kurt feel ridiculous for stopping. He _knew_ there was no Irish Republic; he _knew_ these two were loose canons, underschooled or over, parading a gospel that was bound to fall flat. Already people were dispersing. What was he even doing here?

He tried to blend in but fixed his eyes on the boys, the shorter one slumping as he watched the crowd diffuse back into the street. No one approached them, although Kurt noticed Smythe loitering, a little too casually.

The boy who sang was crestfallen, holding the paper back to Wes, but he pushed out both hands, _keep it_, and said, "no Blaine, it's all you. Hold on to it."

His name was Blaine.

Kurt couldn't stand and watch the two for any longer without drawing attention to himself, so he finally headed to the entrance of the general post office, fishing in his pocket for the letter. He thought for a moment about unsealing it, jotting in an addendum to his dad about these two young men that… what? That had an educated chip on their shoulders. He shrugged and pulled open the building's weighted door.

And froze.

He was met with a hum of activity that had nothing to do with mail carrying. Boys his age, fully grown men, a few women with their hair back in handkerchiefs, completely rearranging the desks of the office so they fit around the walls, even on top of one another. Kurt took a few steps in, and heard excited voices over the rest:

"They heard him, alright, they're coming!"

"It's like they were waiting for it –"

"Get in position!"

A dozen men disappeared to the back of the GPO, a dozen or so more emerged and squatted with their backs along the wall's interior perimeter, and another handful began removing the glass panes from each of the quartered windows. A couple men were posted by the windows, and it wasn't until Kurt studied them that he saw almost every one of them was _armed_. A thread of fear shot through his insides. Guns, these people had guns. Was the boy named Blaine part of this?

Whatever _this_ was, Kurt had no business walking in on it. He turned immediately for the entrance he'd just walked through, his hands clenched, his letter crinkling, but both doors swung open in front of him, and Wes rushed in with a cohort at his heels.

"They're coming, they're here! They're past the river!"

And then it was all a hitch of noise, a couple shouted orders and the sound of metal. Kurt stood in place, eyes darting. The door was completely blocked by an incoming tide of people who had materialized from nowhere outside, a motley of guns and pistols appearing from under jackets. Kurt was close to panicking. A door, a window, _anything_.

Then a body in a jacket he recognized barreled past him, but the boy named Blaine must have seen the letter in Kurt's hand because he caught his shoulder as he swerved to face him, never quite stopping, brown eyes almost angry. "What are you doing?" he shouted, taking a few steps backwards with the current.

"What are – I didn't – I was just – "

"You're American?" Blaine said, even as he was shuffled further back. "Get out of here! Moore, go out Moore Street!" Then someone grabbed his arm and said something urgently into his ear, and Kurt wasn't given another thought. He watched the boy's olive-toned face disappear, the grey jacket and his dark hair retreating further into the GPO.

And then it was too late.


	2. Chapter Two

**Title**: Dublin Rising

**Author**: StingInTheBackground

**Rating:** PG-13

**Genres**: Revolutionary Ireland AU, Romance, Action/Drama, Angst, Historical Fiction

**Characters**: Kurt/Blaine with a smattering of others

**A/N**: Historical notes on my LiveJournal.

* * *

**Chapter Two**

He didn't have time to wonder where Moore Street was before the first gunshots powered in, followed by shouting on all sides. Every body in the open room dropped, some of them illuminated in sunlight under the glass dome in the ceiling center, as a volley of bullets whined in over their heads, dotting the back wall and corners. Someone had been hit, they were rolling on the floor. A strategic few men crouched to the de-paneled windows, maneuvering an assortment of guns from hunting rifles to pistols, and returned fire.

Kurt watched as if from outside his own body, on his hands and knees, blinking gun smoke and tiny bits of plaster from his eyes. He couldn't tell if the movement about him was ordered or chaos. Fifty, sixty people shuttled in all directions and all the while gunshots, gunshots, Kurt's head rang with them. Some of them fired single-handedly, revolvers positioned towards someone – the police, royal army? – outside. Others set themselves low in front of the windows with oversized rifles and Howth guns, their shoulders jerking back from the recoil. Whoever had been hit was still writhing on the ground, attended by a man and woman and making far more noise, Kurt hoped, than a dying person would make.

Kurt had seen more than enough. Crouched over, his jacket hem swifting on the unpolished marble floor, he moved to the back, where the boy – Blaine – had disappeared.

Someone shut the door behind him hurriedly, muffling the shooting a degree. Kurt found himself past a tiny walled handling area and then in what used to be a broad sorting room; there was no metal clicking and cocking here. It was filled to capacity with men and women though, and in as much confusion as the lobby. Blaine was on an interior side directing the construction of a makeshift first aid station. Wary of the bullets he could still hear clanging in and out of the front, Kurt straightened up and walked directly to him.

He was gesticulating to a short brown-haired girl who seemed unhappy with her instructions but went on her way, further still into the GPO's recesses. Blaine did a double-take and then held up another question when he saw Kurt. "You're lost. Why didn't you leave when I – "

"What do you think you're doing?" Kurt demanded, attracting the attention of a couple girls in olive green with their arms full of biscuit tins. "Who are you shooting at?" He was three feet from the boy now, shouting, almost too bewildered even to shrug him off when Blaine held Kurt's elbow and pulled him to a deep indention in the far wall.

Blaine shoved aside the things on an evacuated employee desk before sitting Kurt down. He squatted in front of him and spoke upwards so calmly, so earnestly that if his face didn't look the way it did, Kurt would have been tempted to kick it in. "I'm sorry, sir," he said with that _almost_ neutral enunciation, "that you didn't know not to wander in here when everyone else did, and I'm sorry you couldn't get out before they came for us. I'm going to show you where I hope you can escape, but I need you to stay calm."

He spoke like he was older. But if nothing had stamped out that frankness yet, that transparency in his expression, he couldn't have been, not even in this asylum of a city. Kurt hadn't responded when the door was flung further open, cracking against the wall, and someone shouted for Blaine. Beyond the open frame, the GPO lobby was grey with the residue of the shooting.

"Stay here," and he was gone.

From behind, Kurt watched him pause in the doorway, burgundy hat still hanging in one pocket and the paper in the other, and then he hurried to one side.

No one spoke to Kurt. They were busy carrying sheets, cutting glass from panes, wrenching hand-turned drills into the walls. He couldn't be here. He had to leave this place, he'd go straight to the port station and back to the academy, and then he'd wire his father.

Alright, go.

He leaned out of the cubby and scanned the room for an exit, but saw only a high, high window and the one door back to the lobby; and he sure as hell wasn't going back out _there_. Already the soldiers – no, they were insurgents, they were criminals – had produced a dozen beds, a motley of cots, infirmary beds, and bare mattresses that lay on the floor. A few office desks made of fine stained wood were covered with sheets, an unlit lantern placed by each one and basins of water set below. Kurt stepped back, out of the way against the indention in the wall, with one palm flat on the desk where Blaine had told him to wait.

The sounds from the lobby quieted, then picked back up, then quieted again but the movement in the aid room never stopped. More than once a girl spoke to him swiftly from across the room, in an accent so heavy he thought she must be speaking Gaelic. By the time he deciphered what help they were asking of him, in English, they'd already given him a dirty look and the bed was moved, or the rags were soaked. After a few minutes it became clear they either thought he was slow, or knew he was there by accident.

When Blaine returned, he had lost his jacket and held the door back for two girls who huddled low on their way out. He craned his neck after them with a protective frown, but then shut the door, and when he turned Kurt saw blood on his vest.

He made a sound and jumped up, but Blaine shook his head and took a moment to collect himself. "It isn't mine," he said grimly. "One of our first casualties was James Connolly's son. Our aid station wasn't set up properly, his father's livid."

"Is he… the man hit, is he dead?"

"No." Blaine listened to a brief lull in the bullets on the other end of the building for a moment, finding a rag on one of the cots. "It'll happen soon enough though, it'll happen to some of us, now that we're here." It wasn't clear if he was still talking to Kurt, or himself as he wiped at his stomach, and the red that hadn't seeped into his shirt blotted into the terry-wool. "But Rory's hardly a man. He shouldn't even be here, he's too young. But then he's James Connolly's kid."

"Who is James Connolly?"

Blaine studied him, before answering. "If you don't know, you _really_ shouldn't be here. He's out there now, and all you need to know is he thinks you're a spy. A Brit," he clarified. "I told Wes there was no way, or you wouldn't have stood out so badly. You're even more terrified than the rest of us."

Kurt was mildly offended. "And why are you firing at the British? You don't exactly look like militiamen. And anyway you're on the same side of the war."

"The _war_," Blaine said. "As if there's only one."

He seemed prepared to leave it at that, but Kurt just looked at him.

"This is between us and England. And if we don't look like a militia, that's because we don't have one, everyone knows that, except what's sent to the front to fight for them. We're volunteers, for the Republic of Ireland."

"I didn't know there was a Republic of – "

"There will be."

It was Kurt's turn to consider him, now. It would be so easy to attribute this mess of a rebellion – whoever heard of taking over a post office? – to recklessness, or sheer stupidity. But there was nothing reckless about Blaine's confidence; it was angry but almost sad. So Kurt held out his hand instead. "I'm Kurt. Hummel." They shook. Kurt raised an eyebrow, waiting, and when he got nothing he said, "it's nice to meet you, _Blaine_."

Blaine jerked his hand away, and eyed him in a way Kurt didn't like at all. "I thought we established I'm not a spy? I heard you and your friend this afternoon. Outside. I was there. I heard you sing." _Stop talking, Kurt._ "I thought you were good."

"Oh, I definitely saw you." Then Blaine seemed to listen to his own words. "I mean, you were near the front, towards the left? I'm guessing you didn't understand a word of it, but I'm glad you liked it. I think you were the only one."

That didn't seem true at all – whatever the city thought of this pointless coup, there was no arguing against Blaine's voice out on those steps. Captain _Smythe_ had certainly been interested, but somehow he didn't think Blaine would take that as a compliment.

Blaine was swiping the rag once beneath his shirt, and it emerged from under his hem with a new smudge of blood that had drained through Blaine's clothes to his stomach. Kurt felt ill.

"Anyway, the less you know the better. Don't mention James Connolly's son to anyone when you go home, or wherever you came from. Are you ready?"

_Oh_, right. Kurt nodded and even though the front room was quiet, he was relieved when Blaine steered him away from the doorway, along the edge of the wall towards the back. The men who were drilling holes earlier were widening the circle, creating empty spaces into the next room. Kurt had known the GPO was large, anyone could tell that much; but apparently it had bowels. "Watch your head," Blaine said, nudging him forward with a hand on the small of his back – Kurt jerked away – and they stepped through a foot of wall into a third, smallest room. The furniture had been positioned along the perimeter here, too, although the windows were still intact. Except for the men expanding the hole behind them, they were alone.

"Was it really necessary to destroy your post office?" Kurt asked. It was beautiful, classic architecture – the _waste_.

"There will be more of us," Blaine said, pressing his ear up to a wooden door on the far side. "We can't bottle-neck our way around these tiny doorways for the next month."

"Month?!"

"Quiet! Would you rather waltz out the front? With their army ready to shoot anything that moves?"

Fair enough. "So… this is the back? I can go?"

Kurt wouldn't see him again. He almost wanted to wish him… well, not luck, he didn't _hope_ they took down a British regiment and possibly the whole post office with them. But he hoped this boy got back to his life before long, because this couldn't possibly be it – not someone who looked and spoke and sang like he did. Kurt surveyed him a final time, and half wished he'd met him under almost any other circumstances. As it was…

"I think it's clear," Blaine answered, lowering his voice and unlocking the handle gently. "We have four men out in the back streets who would have told us if they tried to circle around… I guess you don't need to know that." He maneuvered Kurt to the adjacent wall, and flattened himself against the other side with his palm on the door, fingers splayed against the wood. Holding his breath, he pushed it open a few inches.

There were gunshots and Blaine shouted, and the door had three, or maybe four holes in it – but far more terrifying was a burst of sound and energy that came from _inside_ and shook the walls. They both went down, covering their heads, and felt the reverberations in the floor. Kurt's insides were jumbled.

"What the hell was that?" The building was still shuddering when he glanced up and saw white streaks in the high glass window panes. He scrambled low towards the arrangement of wooden desks against the wall, frantically pulling Blaine under first by the arm.

"Come on!"

"What-"

Kurt pushed and Blaine's back crammed against the plating along the bottom of the wall, his shoulders hunched in beneath the largest desk; he was on his side, saying something that was definitely not English and clutching at Kurt to bring him in, further in. Kurt lay faced down next to him as the window produced a series of ominous cracks, and he squeezed over as tightly as he could. But his shoulder was already hitched against Blaine's chest, so close he could feel the young boy's blood from the front of Blaine's shirt on his own right forearm.

When the glass shattered, Blaine wasn't getting enough air to yell and Kurt was only mostly covered. He felt where the shards fell directly on the jacket sleeve of his left arm, cutting through to his cotton shirt. Other bits skid every direction on the hardwood and came to a stop lodged beneath the material of his clothes. He felt every point of contact down to the pin pricks that ricocheted against the back of his neck, before the pain ever registered.

Once it did, he nearly sent Blaine into a confined panic attack. "Are you alright? How bad is it, can you move?"

Ow. _Ow_. Kurt shifted an inch despite the glass, because his muscles couldn't hold that way and because he had a stranger pinned low to the wall whose body heat was as foreign and unnerving as the plates and shards winking at him on floor. He tensed a bit, doing a quick inventory of his left side. He regretted it, hissing; there was absolutely glass in his arm. When he relaxed his muscles, he realized that the moaning he heard was his own voice.

"Kurt, I can't see, I can't tell what – I need you to tell me," Blaine said next to him in the dark, his voice muffled by the wood around them.

"I'm – ngh – I'm okay." He wasn't quite; he could feel glass _inside his skin_. Kurt turned his head carefully; he was eye level with it everywhere, flat pieces piled on top of each other, unsettling, inches from his eyes. He and Blaine were stuck.

"Don't move," Blaine said, as if Kurt might up and jog off. Kurt felt Blaine's hair against his ear as he shifted, hooking an ankle around one leg of the desk and his left hand around the other end. "Can you move in?" he asked with a grunt. "Bring your legs up."

"No I can't, the _glass_."

So Blaine took a breath and unsteadily pushed the desk above them away from the wall, pressing his face to the floor as a few light bits dropped off the surface to his shoulders and hair. Another push, and Kurt tried to focus on Blaine's sounds of effort, on the scrape of the desk above his shoulder blades and backside, on anything but the pieces that had pierced his jacket and the mat of glass that still lined his limbs on the left. A new round of shooting picked up beyond the gape in the far wall, gunshots at different decibels reaching their ears even as they recovered from the blast of whatever just exploded. Everything felt completely unreal to Kurt – he wondered if he was losing blood somewhere.

Blaine had moved the desk entirely from where they lay, and was carefully getting to his feet. "No, stay there. You're bleeding. Put your weight on your left foot and scoot back." Kurt did, and found himself sitting upright in a rectangle oasis of clear floor. Blaine was stepping around him and squatting down. Beyond him were a few of his, well, _comrades_, blinking in through the hole they'd chiseled and nodding at something Blaine was telling them.

Kurt braved a look down at himself, at his white coat. "I'm… bleeding."

Blaine steadied him. "It's not bad at all though, you'll be fine." Like he knew. "Do you feel light-headed?"

"Why would I feel light-headed if it's not bad at all?" Blood on his sleeve, blood on his hip. Why did it bleed through? Wasn't the lining wool?

Wasn't… what was he saying again?

"Okay, it might be a little bad, but not terrible." Blaine's hands hovered over Kurt's, as if to stop him from removing any slivers. One horrifying shard stuck out of Kurt's jacket at an angle and he felt it piercing on the other side, but pulling it out would only make it bleed more. "Hurry it up, please, guys?" Blaine said.

Wes was the first one to them, a trail of mostly open floor behind him and a satchel in his hand, lined with paper. He shot Blaine an inquiring glance, but together they cleaned the lightest bits off Kurt and escorted him back to the first aid room. They sat him down on a cot, two over from a smaller brown-haired boy Kurt assumed was the one hit five minutes in. He was asleep.

The brunette Kurt had seen earlier reappeared, her hair braided into two pigtails beneath her black handkerchief. She held a rag and without preamble, she pulled the large piece from Kurt's jacket. He didn't cry out, almost too surprised to find his voice, but his breath caught and he rested his weight on his left arm, creaking the fragile frame of the bed.

"What happened?" she demanded of Wes, pressing the cloth firmly to the blot of crimson that was widening on Kurt's arm. Her voice was thoroughly American, and it was loud. Kurt slumped a little, dazed, and listened to them speak as if from behind a mist.

"Someone was passing a bomb through a window on the southeast wall. They weren't expecting to be shot at from back there."

"Oh my God. Jacket off," she added to Kurt. She untied the knot of her handkerchief and shook it out once before replacing the rag, which was already soaked through.

"They were shooting at us," Blaine said weakly, to Wes. "From the ground, on Henry Street. Where we should have four men."

Wes swore. "James should know as soon as possible. He'll want someone to go to the top floor to check the road from above."

"I'll go!" the girl said, and Kurt hissed as she removed the doo-rag and shoved it to Blaine.

"Rachel, no – "

But she was gone, back towards the shooting, and Wes ran after her. Blaine started to lift a hand to his forehead, and only seemed to remember Kurt when he tried to discreetly reach for the handkerchief. "Sorry," Blaine said, and took over staunching his arm. Kurt felt exposed when Blaine carefully tugged the long sleeve of his bottom layer up, checking the angry slit in his upper arm. It was perpendicular to the veins and too shallow to have hit a large one anyway. So Blaine poured water over it from the basin, scrunching his face apologetically, wrapped it with a couple feet of gauze, and pulled the sleeve back down.

"How're you doing?"

Well it fucking _hurt_, so it took Kurt a moment to answer. "Oh… I'm great."

Blaine didn't respond to his tone, just pulled Rachel's handkerchief around his arm and tied it in a knot, holding his ruined long sleeve in place beneath it. "The bleeding's slowed. I'm sorry about your arm. And your jacket," he added as an afterthought. "An Enodté, no less."

Kurt arched an eyebrow, or tried to when his face was already tight with pain. "Good eye. Maybe I can find another one when I go home."

Blaine didn't answer immediately. "Right," he finally said, "that's the other bad news. Until we figure out the sniper situation, I think you're more or less stuck here. Maybe longer – you could hardly make a break for it in this condition, I think."

A volley of shooting punctuated his words, and Kurt tried to focus on him. He was trapped? "How long do you expect this to go on?"

Blaine shrugged, then seemed to think Kurt needed another layer of security, and began to wrap a light sheet of gauze around the handkerchief so it was just so. "The point is to last as long as possible, and we've got reinforcements coming. Don't plan on traipsing out the front door – at the very least, you'll have to wait until we find the sniper."

"There's more than one."

They turned and saw Rachel leaning against the doorway, heavily. Her face was pale.

Blaine's fingers were still on the bandage over Kurt's arm. "What? How do you know?"

"Because right now all four of ours on Henry Street are face down at three different intersections."

Blaine's hands fell from Kurt, and the leftover gauze folded over his lap.

He started to get up, to speak to her, but Wes appeared in a flurry of disheveled clothes and gun soot. "You idiot!" he said sharply, looking like he was resisting the urge to shake her. "Why would you want to see a thing like that? Why can't you just stay here?"

"Wes… " Blaine started.

"They were lying in their own blood!" Wes was raising his voice, something that seemed to take them both by surprise. With his wound hidden, Kurt's head was clearing and he cringed for Rachel as she took it, jaw set, cutting her eyes up at him through her bangs. "The last thing we need is you traumatizing yourself, not when we've got a hundred men here who'll be wounded before long and they'll need _aid_."

"I make a good scout," she insisted, keeping her gaze cold on Wes. "They wouldn't shoot a woman who's not shooting at them."

"Scout my ass," Wes answered, making Blaine glance to him. "Give me your gun."

"No! I didn't use it. Connolly didn't mind me going."

"He's a socialist, why would he? He has no sense of – of –"

"Wait, what were they all doing in the middle of the road?" Kurt cut in, baffled. Were these poor people inept? "Weren't they, I don't know, stationed?"

"Their… it looked like their arms were stretched up, like they were dragged there from their posts." Rachel's brown eyes were wet, but her answer was composed. "For us to see."

Wes's anger sank, visibly. Blaine seemed to have steeled himself, a vacant expression taking over his face that Kurt wouldn't have expected. Blaine started to clean his hands and brushed at the grain-sized bits on Kurt's shirt with a crumbled edge of the cloth. Kurt didn't know what he felt. He heard horror stories every week from the Triple Entente papers, and _these_ soldiers had brought it upon themselves. But that didn't make his stomach less sick.

"I'll go help with the rest of the glass," Rachel said, and went to the back room.

Wes watched Blaine work, as he picked out the last of the smaller bits from Kurt's long sleeve shirt with women's tweezers, even though Kurt's other hand was fine, and probably steadier than Blaine's after Rachel's news. They sat against what had almost become the background of shooting from the front room, and shouting that was becoming more and more frequent, and another man was half-carried in and laid next to Rory. Kurt tried to watch the nurses – no, the civilians, regular women – tend to him instead of Blaine's hands finishing their careful extraction of every last piece from his sleeve.

Finally Wes spoke. "So for all we know, we could be surrounded."

"I think not, we would have seen _something_ out there," Blaine said. "When are the rest going to get here?"

"Not soon enough," Wes said over his shoulder and he left, pulling a revolver from his jacket. It was small, but carefully maintained and the handle was worn smooth. Kurt felt bile in his throat, actual vomit he barely held down.

After he left, Blaine was finally satisfied that the cut was secure and the remnant bits were gone. He put away the tweezers and held up both palms, _voila_, like nothing had happened, and looked up from his handiwork. "All done. How does it feel?"

"What's… what's the matter with you people?" Kurt stared directly into Blaine's eyes as if there was a legitimate answer to be found there. "You're insane – this is the most insane, miserable place I've ever seen."

Blaine dropped his hands. But he didn't disagree, and for a moment they listened to the shouts, the rustle of material and calls from the girls to one another in the aid room, soft moaning from Rory's bed and sounds from the men in the lobby as they repositioned and recovered from the fight.

"Maybe so," Blaine said, clapping a light hand on Kurt's knee, "but here's hoping we surprise you." He stood up and checked his back pockets for his cap and the proclamation. Then he straightened the hem of his blood-streaked sweater. "Hang tight for now, I guess, and Rachel and I will both check on you. Oh, and Kurt?"

"What."

Somehow then, in this dreadful place, Blaine gave him a lopsided, ironic little grin that _nearly_ eroded the edge off of Kurt's expression.

"Welcome to Dublin."


	3. Chapter Three

**Title**: Dublin Rising

**Author**: StingInTheBackground

**Genres**: Revolutionary Ireland AU, Romance, Action/Drama, Angst, Historical Fiction

**A/N**: Be aware this chapter takes liberties. Major ones. Historical notes up on my LiveJournal in a day or two.

* * *

**Chapter Three**

Kurt sat on the edge of the bed, five feet away from a dead man.

He'd spent over two hours cross-legged holding his arm over his stomach, watching the other cots fill up around him with busted-up men, with splinted arms and wrapped heads. But when the first _body_ was brought in on a stretcher, it started a debate about what was to be done with it now that the volunteers couldn't come and go as they'd expected. Not until the men from outside Dublin showed up. In the end he was laid on a bed between Kurt and Rory, and Kurt moved to stand at the other side of the room. Another hour passed and he realized his circulatory system wasn't ready for that; he had to recover. He sank back down, dizzy, and turned his back to the sheeted body.

Blaine had gone off some time ago. Kurt constantly wondered where the volunteers he'd come to recognize were, and felt a sprig of relief whenever Rachel, who hadn't actually spoken more than two words to him, swept in or someone hurriedly mentioned Wes as they ran out. At least a few of them were people now, not just a shoddily-uniformed mob. He wished Blaine would come back.

It was late afternoon when a new shift of muscled boys went to work on the perimeter of the aid room, making another gaping hole of dismantled wall. It wasn't far into their process that Kurt realized he'd underestimated the element of engineering in the operation. There was actual construction happening, there were physics involved, almost like they thought they could adapt the infrastructure without destroying it. Kurt knew because Blaine had returned and, taking careful cues from a man holding a blueprint roll, went to work with a saw-edged chisel, his long sleeves rolled up to his elbow. He removed a small rod that had warped along the perimeter of the hole-way and knocked the heel of his palm upwards against the plaster it had braced, testing it. His hair was resisting the gel by now, damp and curling against his forehead and the nape of his neck. Kurt swallowed and looked away.

The sheet over the dead man peaked like points on a mountain at his nose, mouth, stomach, knees, and feet.

Kurt retched.

There was too much going on still, and he was the least of anyone's worries, but to his horror Blaine looked over his shoulder directly at him, confused and then concerned. He pawned his tool off on someone, and Kurt willed down the nausea as Blaine hurried over.

But then he stopped short; he seemed to just now see the covered body, and whirled away, angrily, without speaking to Kurt. His voice came through moments later though, outside the room but clearly audible, and accompanied by two others.

"- thought we got rid of – of whoever that is!"

"Calm down, Blaine, what if it were Rory? It's just while we wait for Westmeath."

"What do you think that does to morale, Wes? What would James Connolly say if he knew you had his troops lying next to men with their lungs shot out?"

"Your basket case in there isn't one of the _troops_." Kurt strained his ears.

"Basket case?" came the third voice, strong and masculine. "I thought he was a hostage."

"He's neither!"

"Blaine, we can't just pile up dead people like blocks. That man died for Ireland, none of this means anything if we don't – "

"We can't give priority to dead men, alright, we all _know_ that. I know we're late getting reinforcements but we can't be a funeral parlor until then. We should put him and any others downstairs, and we'll… we'll get them back to their families as soon as we can."

Kurt looked at the body-shaped sheet. And he thought of his own dad, in Lima waiting for his letter.

Who was this man's father?

Footsteps. The first boy through the door was tall with a mostly shaved head. Blaine's expression behind him was grim and Wes gave Kurt a decent nod as they took the man straight away, still under the sheet. Kurt never saw his face.

* * *

Kurt learned a few things that evening. He learned that there were pockets of rebellion all over the city – in city hall, St. Stephen's Green, a _bakery_ even. There was more than a little ineptitude in the ranks, and to Kurt, the fact that they were commandeering the civil buildings with zero military use had to be the most obvious display yet. But then, when night fell they snuck runners out towards Jacob's bakery, and they came back with over two days' worth of provisions.

Kurt also gathered that Blaine didn't have a gun, and he was the only volunteer who wasn't desperate to get his hands on one. The shooting had settled, for the night Kurt hoped, when Blaine carefully brought him something that resembled dinner, with two coffee mugs of water gripped in the palm of his other hand.

"I can walk, you know. It's just a cut."

"You mean a gaping laceration, and don't argue with the person who patched you up. Anyway, I know you can walk," Blaine answered, handing him a fork with a crooked prong, "but our food station is sort of a mess. It's in the sorting room upstairs, and we keep tripping over mail bags with food in our hands. It'd be funny if we weren't trying to feed a couple hundred men. Maybe a thousand, in a few hours."

Kurt folded the contents of his bowl over itself. It congealed back into place. "Let me upstairs. If the girls are cooking, I can help."

Blaine looked surprised. "You want to help us?"

"I… no. No, of course not, but if I spend another hour on this bed, I may actually go crazy."

"Well, we can't have that." He grinned down at Kurt, watching him poke at the slab.

Wes came in with a cigarette in his hand, looking annoyed.

"What, are you smoking now?" Blaine sat on the edge of Kurt's cot, content with taking a break from kitchen duty and rubbing his thumb over the rim of his water cup.

"No, I confiscated it from Puck. Honestly I don't think it bothers any of the men, but Rachel's adamant about it, anywhere near the wounded. I told her that once the cavalry arrives, we won't be able to monitor seven hundred men who all want to smoke while they shoot."

Blaine gave a 'hm' by way of agreement, and took a sip.

"So there are others coming?" Kurt said. "'It's not the post office against half the British reserves."

Blaine nearly spit out the water just at the prospect. "You must think we _want_ to die out here. Of course there are others. And not just Dublin, either. You name it – Westmeath, Cork, even eight hundred volunteers in Kildare." He seemed more confident in the fact, even prouder somehow than when he'd read the Republic's proclamation. There was a surety in his voice and hazel eyes that made Kurt feel just a little less overwhelmed. "Westmeath will meet us here. Ireland's turning out."

"As we speak, in fact," Wes confirmed. "Assuming our commander in the west is doing things right. There's twenty thousand of us. Unless the English churn out forty thousand on the first day, we'll make a good stand of it."

"And if we hold out on a month or so, get a backing of non-volunteers somewhere along the way, we've won. We'll have half of Ireland in arms if Parliament doesn't talk to James Connolly before then."

Kurt only had doubts. Well, doubts and a grudging respect he attributed to their dedication, and that small point of light that appeared in Blaine's eyes whenever they flickered up. "How are you going to arm twenty thousand men, all over the country?"

"Twenty thousand minus one," Wes said, lobbying the unused cigarette at Blaine.

He didn't look remotely embarrassed, just wrinkled his nose and swatted the thing away from him. "We can't all be sharpshooters."

"We can at least try." Kurt twisted to see Rachel the loud brunette, arms crossed, leaning against the frame of the entranceway.

Blaine didn't even turn around to face her before rolling his eyes. "Kurt, I don't think you've been formally introduced to Rachel." He leaned in towards Kurt then, laid two casual fingers on his forearm below the rag, and whispered in a way that was meant to be heard, "if she tries to get you to call her 'Sergeant Berry,' don't listen. She's no more a sergeant than I am."

She huffed. "I could have been."

"Rachel taught some of our guys how to use their firearms, these past few months."

"I could have taught you too, Blaine, and a whole squad of Cumann na mBan if Connolly would arm more of them."

This attracted the attention of the men nearby, and there were sounds of disapproval from a couple occupied beds. She glared at them. "What?"

"A whole squad of women with pistols." Wes sounded weary, and Kurt guessed the subject wasn't a new one. "Rachel, there wasn't time. We need people with experience, with discipline."

"Don't talk to me about experience! Three dozen of your decent shooters here and ten more in Boland's Mill are here because I taught them how to hold the things. And just wait until the fighting really starts up. Let me know how disciplined you _boys_ are then."

"It's not safe," Wes said, pacifying.

"You won't build a revolution off just men! You can't do it with just the men!"

Blaine was noticeably quiet, so Kurt spoke up.

"I think she's right."

Several pairs of eyes swiveled towards him, even the conscious men in the beds adjacent.

"If Rachel's a better shot than all of you, what makes you think the other girls will be so much worse? If all this is about rights, or if it's about getting Ireland back from England, I'm surprised you won't let them help you fight. It's not very… egalitarian of you."

A beat. For a moment it was awkward. But that seemed to quiet the argument, as a couple men turned back to their own conversations, grumbling, and Rachel gave Wes a triumphant look that he returned with a shake of his head. Rachel found someone to tend to, and Wes left the room.

Maybe Kurt should have kept his mouth shut, but then, he knew Rachel was right. And Blaine was smiling at him. He was _smiling_ at him. Kurt cleared his throat and said "so, where did you get the guns?"

His smile faltered. "I don't think I should tell you that."

"Did you commandeer the armories?"

"No. Forget it, let's talk about something else. Did I tell you James Connolly is a Marxist?"

"Big deal, I hear that about all sorts of people. My dad's a congressman, and he – "

Blaine almost choked on nothing. "Your what?"

"My dad, he's – "

"You're kidding. Oh my god," Blaine groaned. "Just what we need, kidnapping the son of a U.S. senator."

"House member. And I thought I wasn't a hostage."

He wasn't serious, not totally, but Blaine looked disturbed, waving his hands defensively in a way that was oddly endearing. "No! No, Kurt, you're not. It's just…" He let out a breath. "Of all things. A congressman. Where?"

"Ohio."

That seemed to take Blaine by surprise. He opened his mouth, seemed to think better of it, and closed it again.

"What is it?" Kurt asked.

Blaine shook his head. "Nothing. I've… I've been to Ohio." He stood up.

After he left, Kurt didn't see him for the rest of the evening.

* * *

Around midnight he found his way upstairs and helped the girls in a tiled break room that would turn into a death trap if something went wrong with any of the dozen portable stove irons they'd carted in. Kurt had never cooked on an assembly line before and it flew against everything natural in him to settle for what didn't even count as ingredients in his book. They used flour and gristle to make gristle pies, saving the real food now that they were on lockdown with the count over three hundred men and several dozen women. But Kurt could make it look remotely appetizing, and Rachel was especially grateful. "Maybe Wes will actually eat the biscuits now, instead of pretending he's not hungry. Like it'll hurt my feelings if he just out and says _'your food is garbage, Rachel.'_" She took a small plate out.

Wes was holding the plate by the time Kurt ambled one floor up, where the bulk of men were eating or asleep and the lighting was low. This story was barely compartmentalized – they essentially spanned a single room lined with smaller windows. The paneling around the southeast wall was crumbled, from the blast earlier, two stories below. Kurt grazed his thumb over the cloth Blaine had bandaged over his arm, which had dulled to a throb so long as no one breathed near it.

Wes stood disconcertingly close to an east-facing window, plate in hand, and gestured Kurt over. "It's alright," he said when he was in easy earshot. "No one wants a round of shooting in the middle of the night. That's how you get everyone _but_ soldiers killed. Just be careful."

Kurt approached from the side and peered out and finally, he saw the shadowed scene of what everyone was shooting at all day.

Two tall light posts stood within view, level with the third floor but thirty yards apart and on the opposite side of the street, only dimly illuminating the shops in between in fuzzy yellow that faded into pure black towards the middle. But it was enough to tell that the other side of the broad road, all the shops and offices, were completely barricaded. He imagined a rank of tightly uniformed soldiers behind it – formally trained and probably relieved not to be at the real front, in France. Alleys were blocked by metal sheets and automobiles; windows were blacked out. If he squinted he imagined he could see shadows on the ground duck this way or that, or the barrel of a gun angled out of an opening.

When he stopped focusing on one possible figure and stared down at nothing, completely still, he realized there was movement everywhere, however slight. The far side of the street was fully populated. He almost jerked back, but Wes was calm beside him, and he remembered they were at a dark window, one of many. But the scene below was unnerving; there were men out there, lots of them, with free space all around.

He didn't risk any extra movement, but looked down the street, from their high vantage point. More shadows, smaller masses of barricade, a couple calls back and forth across the asphalt. The British army was stationed along the entire east side. Kurt guessed that if the volunteers didn't take care of the snipers and hold their side, they'd be surrounded.

"Westmeath and the rest are coming from our side," Wes assured him, as if he could sense Kurt's trepidation. He assessed his biscuit and took a bite.

"Don't you think they have more coming too?"

"Oh, absolutely. We took the city hall on the riverside, to slow down their boats, and to get the printing press, but it'll be the first thing to go if we don't get help. And then they'll more or less flood in." Wes narrowed his eyes south, looking down the street into the night, but nothing was visible beyond the tiny glints of the southern lamp posts pricking up from the River Liffey. "There was all sorts of activity further down from city hall, earlier this afternoon. But we don't know what. Blaine's had an ear out all night."

Kurt didn't ask how Blaine would know about the other sectors before anyone else. He let Wes keep going.

"This must seem crazy to you." It was a question, and Kurt's answer seemed to matter.

Seemed to matter a lot, actually.

"I'm not exactly an authority on this thing," Kurt said. "I mean, what do I know?"

"About as much as the average American, I'm guessing."

Ah. Of course, they'd want a response from the States. "Well, in that case, yes. It does seem crazy. But it seems like craziness with… with a point, right? And anyway, writing up a declaration of independence, rising up against England on your own front. You're not the first ones to do it, you know."

"Yes, exactly," Wes said, leaning in. "What did you think of our document? Compared to 1776?"

Kurt blinked. It wasn't remotely comparable, the U.S. had a revolution, not a… whatever this was turning into. But there was no not taking Wes seriously. "I don't know, I didn't know what was going on. It was powerful. A little romantic I think, but… well, Blaine…"

He laughed. "Yeah, Blaine. He'd be an officer in a second if he'd pick up a gun. He'd be an officer if he'd pick up a _BB_ gun."

Kurt kept himself from glancing to the shape inside Wes's jacket where he kept his revolver and found he had no response to that. Wes didn't seem to need one. "And he seems to _personally_ care what you think. Don't ask me why, since as far as I can tell you just sort of wandered in and got in the way, but he does." He was smiling when he said it. "So don't mention it to him if you think we're nuts. You'll just have to trust that we're all here for a reason."

"Right. The unfettered control of Irish destinies."

Wes looked at him for a moment. "But it's just a matter of pride when you leave it at that. It's just patriotism. These are _people _we're talking about."

He looked out the window, and Kurt wondered how many years he'd spent looking at this street. "My brother… he was born fourteen years before me." Wes broke a corner off a biscuit, didn't put it in his mouth. "About the time I came around my father lost his job interpreting for the bank. Because they weren't interested in Gaelic business with the west – they wanted European languages, French. Gregory joined the British Army before I was ten."

"Your brother?"

He nodded. "We needed the money. God, he hated them so much. They sent him away, to help… well, to help them lord over South Africa. And he was killed."

There was no great emotion, his voice wasn't thick. But Kurt got the feeling it wasn't a topic that came up much with the people who _knew_ Wes. "I'm sorry." So his brother would have been about Wes's age, Kurt guessed, when he died. "Who killed him? A South African?"

"No. You'd think so," Wes answered, leaning his back against the wall and scanning his eyes over the quiet room of men. "A rebel, you'd think, maybe an army of them. Someone who didn't want to be colonized and bought a gun and shot the British soldier…who was actually Irish." There was irony in his voice, not quite sad or angry. "But no. It was another Irishman."

If there was more to it than that, and there had to be, Wes didn't say.

"That's… horrible," Kurt said. "So how is this not a matter of 'pride' for you?"

"Well it is, of course, but it's more. I have two younger brothers as well. We don't have an ounce of security right now. Not to mention my sisters. Two of them. Irish Catholic, you know," he added, grinning a little so Kurt knew it was okay, he was okay. "Probably why my dad was replaced at the bank in the first place. The spot went to a Brit."

"A Protestant," Kurt observed.

"Not necessarily," Wes said. "I mean, yes, probably, but not necessarily. It doesn't matter now who he is. The people who've lost the things they earned… they matter. I just hope Dublin sees it that way once we've got enough of a showing to get their attention."

It was quiet a moment, but not awkward. Wes was so forthright, so easy, like an adult before he'd reached full adulthood. He looked at his plate of food and tilted it towards the soft light. "So I heard it was your idea to undercook the biscuits."

"Oh," Kurt said, off-guard. "Yes. I didn't realize it was breaking news."

"Rachel was just up here."

"Well, you're not using eggs, so it doesn't hurt to take them out early. Then you don't burn the edges in the tin and the middle keeps cooking a few minutes anyway." It was surreal, talking about something so normal with death in their heads and who knows how many shadows out in the night moving, sitting, waiting until the morning just like they were with their guns. But Kurt detached that half of things. "Cooking is something I enjoy, might as well put it to good use."

Wes laughed. "Good attitude. If Blaine wasn't tied up with the telegraph – probably literally – I'd make you two morale officers."

That surprised Kurt. "Where's the telegraph station?"

"One over, small room, no windows. Look for Blaine plunking out a message at a snail's pace." He lifted an edible biscuit in farewell and went downstairs.

Kurt followed him as far as the hallway, then found the only other separate room on the floor. There was a light on inside.

Blaine was hunched over, a pencil behind his ear and stacks of loose paper shoved to the perimeter of the desk against the wall. He had the band of a headset looped around his neck so the ear phones rested on his collarbone. The transmitter device was on the table, smaller than Blaine's hands. So it was a two-way. Kurt was impressed, but it didn't appear that Blaine was particularly adept with it. His cap was on the desk next to the crinkled proclamation, which he'd flattened under the dim light. He tapped slowly, almost as if he were counting beats in his head as he went.

"How's it coming?"

Blaine couldn't spare him the attention, his slow clicking laboring on until he took the headset off and tossed it on the table next to the proclamation. His hair was fully unmanaged now, and when he realized it was Kurt he pulled his cap on, a vain effort that didn't come close to hiding the dark curls. He hit a switch and nodded Kurt in, smiling. "Two paragraphs to go. I wish we'd kept it to half a page."

Kurt took a seat; the room barely fit both of them. "Who are you sending it to? Your document."

"Best case scenario? A Transatlantic ship, if they're listening. A couple corners of London, and Liverpool. Berlin."

"Germany!"

"Oh – " Blaine seemed to only then realize what he'd said, but there was no way to un-say it. "We're not picky, Kurt. We'll take support wherever we can get it."

Kurt stared. "Even if they're bleeding France dry?"

Blaine was uncomfortable. "Who's 'they'? Anyway France has England. Probably the States too. Ireland's got no one, and we're being _strangled_. As long as Germany's against the ones screwing us from their own parliament, we have the same enemy. The only reason we've made it this far is because Germany's tied them up on the front."

"It's not right."

"Well I'm glad you can afford never to do anything that's wrong," he snapped. "Maybe your ritzy congressman father would like to put in a plug for us in D.C., and then we can all-"

He cut off as a faint clicking caught both their attentions. Blaine swept up the headset, almost panicked, and held one ear of it against his – an incoming message, the first one all day. With his free hand he flipped over his copy of the proclamation, but was unable to find his pencil. He patted the top of the desk uselessly as he looked about him, opened up a drawer and closed it. Kurt leaned forward as the clicking continued from the receiver, plucked the pencil from behind Blaine's ear, and laid it down in front of him.

The message was messy as he wrote it, awkwardly spaced. Blaine couldn't concentrate on the telegraphic alphabet and make English words at the same time. More than once he let out a frustrated noise, shaking his head at himself and scratching through a letter. Kurt sat back into his chair, resisting the temptation to stand behind him as he worked and read over his shoulder. It was rough, those two minutes of watching Blaine struggle, acutely aware of how important the message could be but simply unequipped to record it. Which told Kurt something about how few people were probably even trusted at the station.

"It's a run down of all the activity we heard from down south Sackville Street," Blaine eventually announced, slashing a diagonal line between two clusters of letters, deciphering the message. His body was relaxing after the frenzy and stress of the message, and he shakily pulled a stray letter off the top of a stack, returning the loose leaves and flipping the envelope over to write in a blank space. Steadying his breath, he re-wrote the message legibly. Kurt scooted forward to read.

_Three regs. Front attack_

_Clanwilliam House, Irish Ind., and Freeman's Jrnl gone._

_Cas: 200 R Army, 18 Volun., 6 civ._

"Three regiments headed towards our south Sackville post a few hours ago, from the south. A frontal assault, apparently. It took seven waves." Blaine looked like he could hardly believe it. "Why would they head straight down the street? Did they think we'd meet them head on? Everyone's stationed at windows and on roofs. _Seven_ frontal attacks before they broke through…" Blaine looked like he was processing, then glanced at his notes. "They tried to occupy some of the buildings but we shot them out. I don't know all which ones, except that the _Independent_ and _Freeman's Journal_ were both caught in the middle, and one of them caught fire."

Kurt's eyes widened. "You're sitting here laboring over one telegram trying to get some publicity, and then you go and torch your own newspapers?"

"I didn't say that, I just said they _were_ torched," but Blaine looked anxious. He tapped at a line on his notes. "Almost two hundred casualties on their end. I guess they just kept coming, and we picked them off from our outposts."

Kurt's stomach flopped. "There are two hundred men piled up in the street right now?"

Blaine's tapping got faster. "I know, Kurt, I know. It's not going to get better. Not so many volunteers, but the third regiment eventually broke through. Probably around nightfall, or we would have known."

"You think they came here? They're across the street with the others?"

Blaine shrugged. "Some of them, I'm sure. We can't stop them from coming, honestly. South Sackville, the river, the north bridges – there are just too many ways in. We're just on the defensive whenever they get here."

Kurt didn't know those places. He knew casualty numbers, though, had pored over them when his dad had to vote on the U.S. sending troops or not. Compared to the Triple Entente news, these numbers really were nothing. But it was so close. Just down the street. The last number went unmentioned: 6. Civilians dead.

Blaine put his pencil down and folded the envelope over once. "So, we know the city's on our side if we use it well. We know these streets backwards. And it says something that our post – about a hundred men – could hold up against their numbers. If we get help soon, and they don't learn fast, we could win this thing. Also tells us that if we _don't_ get help soon, it doesn't matter how well we fight – we'll be overrun before Westmeath gets here." The adrenaline had less of a hold on him now; it was good for him to talk through it, to get a handle on the day while he helped Kurt understand. He slid the folded envelope across the desk to his right, towards Kurt. "We could get another message any minute, maybe even from Westmeath. Will you…"

Kurt reached with his left hand first, just to see, grimaced, and took it with his right. "Who does this go to?"

"James Connolly."

"I have no idea what he looks like. And no one trusts me."

"They'll know my writing. Or find any officer, then, with a green band on their arm. You know, like Wes's?"

Kurt shook his head.

"Then just find Wes." Blaine set the headphones on again. "Thanks."

Kurt hadn't expected to feel useful. Didn't think he'd forget all about the gash in his arm but what mattered was finding Wes, for Blaine. He didn't expect to elaborate on Blaine's shorthand, feel the eyes of twenty-five soldiers on him. There were a couple cocked heads at his accent, but none of the sneers he was used to getting from boys whose voices dropped early and deep. Some of the volunteers were bleary, waking up, but most of them were alert like Wes, who took the paper and gave Kurt a hurried clap on the shoulder as he headed to find someone more important.

Lima, safety, seemed far away. But when the men listened and fist-pumped the casualty ratio towards him, as if he had something to do with it, the Royal Academy of Music seemed even further.

Kurt was almost smiling when he ascended the concrete steps again in the back of the GPO, bypassing the spread of men talking in low voices. The telegraph center was silent. "Blaine?" he said softly.

His back was to him, and this time he didn't make the first move at Kurt's voice. His cap was tossed on the desk next to the transmitter along with his pencil, the proclamation and the headset. His hands were set on the desk as well, clenched. There was a new message recorded beneath his elbows.

"Blaine."

He jerked a little as he turned, started to stand up until Kurt stopped him. "No, stay, what is it? Should I get Wes?" He kept his hand on Blaine's shoulder even as he sat beside him.

Blaine's eyes flickered low to it, then back in front of him. "Do you remember you asked how we'd arm everyone?" he said finally. "We arranged for the rest of our arms to dock out west. On a submarine."

Kurt looked at him as though he'd sprouted another head. "Where did you get a submarine?"

"Germany. It's not coming anymore."

Kurt swallowed his first reaction. "Well… well just think of how many of you here already had guns. You'll get by on what you've got, what the rest bring with them when they – "

There was a jolting crash as Blaine lifted his arms, upsetting the transmitter now on its side, wires dislodged on the table. He flexed his fingers once and then gripped his own hair. "They're not _coming_, Kurt. It was intercepted; the officer on board's already been killed and our commanders outside Dublin sent out a countermand."

"Meaning what?" Kurt knew, his insides felt it.

Blaine's nerves showed in his expression, his hands, his _skin_. "It means no one else is rising. They were ordered not to. The first commander called it off himself after we… and we're just now getting the message." His voice sounded like it belonged to a completely different person, losing the shreds of composure it had to begin with. "It's just Dublin, oh my God, it's just us. I have to find James Conno – "

"No, Blaine, stop. Would you just breathe for a second?" Even as he spoke Kurt felt his own panic hitching, and wrenched it down. Why did he look out that window at the British ranks? Why did Blaine tell him there were thousands more? "I'll tell Wes, I know where he is." He slid the new telegram notes from under Blaine's arm but he didn't get up, not yet, not with Blaine like this. "Who's your first commander? The one who…"

"He's not _my_ commander. He was supposed to coordinate with us, we've been planning this for months!" Blaine could barely keep his hands still, stood half-way up and sat back down, picked up the proclamation and ran his finger along its edges. "They've… they've killed us, Kurt."

"You're not even listening to yourself," Kurt said, as he scooted his chair in. "Of course they haven't. There have to be four hundred men in this building, and some, what, two thousand more out there who _are_ fighting. St. Stephen's and the bakery, and city hall, and others, right? No army would massacre those kinds of numbers outside of the war."

Blaine closed his eyes. Kurt pressed on.

"Your guy – James Connolly? He'll surrender now if you can't win, and the worst that'll – "

Kurt realized a second too late that it was the wrong thing to say. Blaine held the proclamation desperately tight, looked as though he wanted to tear it apart and cry into it at once. "I'm sorry for what I said about your father," he said, distant and trembling. "I snapped at you, I shouldn't have."

Kurt guided the paper down to the desk, hesitated less than a second, and put his hand over the back of Blaine's. Blaine's fingers were cold, unsteady, and he didn't react. Where was he even from? Who taught him to sing and why should Kurt care? He couldn't understand why he felt for _this_ boy, why the survival of a nation he'd only tripped into and men he didn't know all suddenly almost mattered, just because they mattered to Blaine. "I'll find Wes," he whispered again, but didn't move. The third floor was still, and dark, and probably for about five minutes more before Kurt delivered the message, it was quiet.

Finally, Blaine's hand turned upwards and gripped Kurt's.


	4. Chapter Four

**Title**: Dublin Rising

**Author**: StingInTheBackground

**Genres**: Revolutionary Ireland AU, Romance, Action/Drama, Angst, Historical Fiction

* * *

**Chapter Four  
**

All things considered, Wes took the news remarkably well. He threw the plate against the wall, watched it shatter onto the hardwood, and then calmly addressed the men. But Kurt was learning to pay attention to faces, not just words. There was sweat below Wes's hairline, even as he said "alright everyone, settle. We knew this would sort out today's fighters from tomorrow's." Rachel moved behind him, panning up the glass before he could step on it.

"There are fewer of us – so what? Out-manning the British army was never a possibility, we all knew that. We can still fight hard and fight smart, just like on South Sackville, until they agree to meet with us."

A murmur of doubt rippled to the back but all eyes stayed on Wes. Rachel watched him with the dustpan in her hand. There was sweat on his upper lip now. They were locked down with no help coming and Kurt realized, listening, that Wes had no choice. He was quelling a panic before it started; they couldn't handle a room full of Blaine's reaction. He _had_ to know they would surrender, could even be overrun before they got the chance. But he went on:

"Don't forget we're here for something worth standing alone for." Finally, a couple nods. "The eyes of our nation is upon its Republic, men. Forget Westmeath, and Cork. We're the elite now by default. Relish it."

It had an effect he seemed satisfied with. _Nicely done_, Kurt thought, but he had gathered it wasn't up to Wes. It was up to this James Connolly, whom Kurt had accepted he probably wouldn't meet, and was glad. And unless the man was an idiot, they'd give over, call it off. They were outnumbered almost seven to one, and wasn't that the bottom line?

Kurt wondered what the procedure was. Evacuate the men and send out the leader with a white flag? Hide the leaders and surrender en masse? What would happen to him?

He didn't know he was exhausted until he decided to mount the stairs one more time to see Blaine. But the door to the makeshift telegraph room was closed and he heard a faint tapping inside – even with everything crumbling into a disaster, Blaine had sat back down to relay the rest of their document. The clicking was slow, rhythmic but plodding, and Kurt listened to it for a solid minute imagining Blaine hunched over, his hair a mess, clothes a mess, determined to get that damn proclamation to New York.

It was then, with his arms crossed and back leaned against the corridor wall, that Kurt realized: they absolutely weren't surrendering.

* * *

It seemed understood that he would be given a bed for as long as possible, and more than likely Blaine had something to do with it. Kurt was starting to feel uncomfortable in it though, guilty even, nevermind that there were still open cots when he woke up in the morning. He pushed down the sheet with his good arm and decided he wouldn't come back, he'd find a new base. There's no lounging in an infirmary full of infirm people, when you can move about.

They still had running water in the GPO's restroom, but it was in such constant use that the wait had actually gotten hostile. Without an emergency it was barely worth it. He wet a rag and headed upstairs, stopping in the cold stairwell to take his shirt off. The sun was up but it was still early morning, and it was quiet outside the lone window a flight up from where Kurt stood. He felt almost secure with the concrete and marble around him, closing off the outside, closing off the shot-out rooms full of frightened, angry men. Kurt untied the handkerchief, hissing as the pressure retracted from his injury. He extracted his good arm from his long-sleeved shirt and then peeled down the other sleeve from his shoulder, knowing the gauze below was soaked through from the way his shirt clung to it like adhesive.

He could feel the chill bumps on his skin and he had a bloody bandage hanging from one hand when the door creaked behind him.

"Wow."

Kurt spun around – it was Puck.

"You are…. _ghostly_ pale, man," he said. He seemed to know Kurt too, and didn't introduce himself.

Kurt held his shirt up to his chest. "And you're _appallingly_ rude, so. Nice to meet you."

"Easy, America. I'm just on official business."

"Alright then," Kurt said, stepping aside from the stairs so he could go about it.

But Puck didn't go, just flopped the hem of his ratty short-sleeved shirt over his pants once looking satisfied. He had round eyes and the first smile Kurt had seen yet that wasn't burdened with something else. "Wes sent me," he clarified. "To do the thing."

"Do you want me to ask what it is?"

"I have to wake up Blaine." He said it like he'd been hand-picked for the task.

Kurt snorted. "Well, you're definitely doing your part to keep things running."

"At least I'm up, and not just lounging around the stairwells with no clothes on."

"I have clothes on – " Kurt felt the tips of his ears color, and pulled his arm through a sleeve, but then realized he still hadn't washed and re-wrapped his wound.

"Relax, guy, I'm kidding. Get Blaine to help you with that when he gets back."

That got Kurt's attention.

"Back?"

"He said he'd put our flag up before the shooting starts again. It's light out, so he's behind schedule."

Blaine was going? Out there? "Couldn't you have done it?"

Puck shrugged. "You sort of have to army crawl up on the roof, and he's tiny enough to stay out of sight. I'm normal sized. Idea is to not get shot before the flag's in place."

"And after it's in place?"

"Well, obviously that'd suck, too."

Kurt frowned, and couldn't help feeling like Blaine was being exploited. Maybe he should at least pretend to take on an armed role. "That's not safe."

Puck laughed. "Funny, he said the same thing when I told him we should just shove you out the front door, and let you make a run for it." He took the steps up two at a time.

"Hey," Kurt called after him.

"Yeah?"

"Aren't you scared?" Outside, a shot went off maybe half a mile away, followed by a pause and then several more. "I mean, you're about fifteen thousand men short."

Puck turned back up the stairs, and Kurt couldn't see his face as he answered from past the first landing. "Nah."

* * *

Blaine, come to find, thought that was utter garbage. But then, he'd been shot at on the roof just minutes ago, so Kurt didn't blame him for being a little on edge. "Of course he's scared," Blaine said, lowering his voice so the others wouldn't hear. "He's Puck, but he's not stupid. _Nothing's_ going the way it was supposed to. Just look at this."

He had a newspaper in his hand, the _Irish Times_. SHOCKING INSURRECTION, read a giant caption above what had to be South Sackville Street, unidentifiable bodies in the center.

_"An attempt has been made to overthrow the constitutional Government of Ireland_," the opening paragraph read, _"as some ten thousand armed rebels seized the city of Dublin at 12 noon, after the circulation of this paper's Monday edition was complete. In response to the security forces' barricade, which immediately went up across the street from their headquarters at the post and telecommunications office, the rebels then hid at strategic points in the city and mowed down all incoming forces attempting to restore order."_

"Ten thousand armed rebels?" Kurt said, incredulous. If only.

Apart from that, it seemed more or less true.

"Keep reading," Blaine said.

_While the purpose of the insurrection remains unclear, Dubliners are encouraged to stay in-doors Tuesday until the anarchists are stamped out. Ultimately, this desperate episode in the city's history can have only one end._

"Maybe you should have telegraphed your proclamation to the newspaper," Kurt said. "I don't think they even know why you're here."

"We sent them two copies. And the police, and MP's. They know what this is about. But they want to pretend it's only Dublin; they don't want to make it about Ireland."

"Some nerve," Kurt said wryly, looking back to the _Times_. "And after all you did to literally obliterate their competition. Honestly, Blaine, what did you expect?"

"They have a nationalist staff! The editor fought in the Boer Wars!"

"You set _fire_ to the other newspapers –"

"We don't know how that happened," Blaine insisted.

Kurt scanned the rest of the page. The index column was bulleted with headlines about retail evacuations and civilian testimonies and… Kurt flipped to the third page. "Did you read this already?"

"No, what?"

Kurt pointed and they looked together. _Shortly after the South Sackville massacre – _

"They were rushing the Clanwilliam House, they were shooting at us!" Blaine said. "It's not like they were just standing around –"

"Stop, Blaine, look."

– _an estimated dozen or so hidden rebels opened fire at a team of the Dublin Veteran's Corp, which was on a routine parade maneuver through the city with unloaded weapons. It is to be lamented that the Sinn Feiners are unable or have chosen not to discern between the governmental forces they claim to want to destroy, and the local chapters of their former military. Seven men were fatally wounded, all between the ages of 48 and 66._

Kurt looked at Blaine. "Is this true?"

He had gone completely pale, disbelieving. "I don't know. It… it could be." He put a hand up to his forehead. "If they were uniformed, if they had weapons… it could be."

"Which would bring your civilian casualties up to –"

"Thirteen." Blaine didn't need to be told.

* * *

There was no telling what signaled the first of the fighting after the sun had risen. Other than the man who first got a clear shot at a figure behind the barricade, or heard the first order from someone who could be an officer, there was just no telling. By the time the sunlight had settled into a morning haze, Kurt's ears were numbed again by the firing. Only this time, he didn't flatten on the floor, but crouched and scuttled towards the interior hallway.

Rachel was a point of constant movement, pistol in one hand and medicinal alcohol in the other. A man knelt and aimed out the nearest window with his rifle grasped firmly in his hands, rosary beads hanging from his fingers. In the hallway two men were couching a crude grenade in a pillow sack, calling for a clearing so they could pass through.

"Don't!" came Rachel's voice, and she hurried between the two and the window.

"Get the hell away, this is live!" one of them shouted.

"There are people down there! There are kids!"

Kurt stopped, sure he'd misheard, and then moved to a corner window and peeked – she was right. On either side of the main British barricade were civilians, mostly women in mismatched clothes, but also boys scrambling through broken holes in the glass of evacuated shops. A man emerged from Clery's department store with a lady's style fur coat in his arms; a frizzle-haired woman leaned out of the third story to drop a leather satchel to a woman below, who dropped it and out spilled things that glinted in the morning. Young girls who had been hiding behind an automobile descended upon it and seized it in handfuls.

For the rest of the morning things only got worse. Wes was getting more and more frustrated that they couldn't fire freely, because the Dublin underworld had come out in droves by early afternoon. One man even brandished his own gun towards the British, towards the GPO, towards the other civilians who looked like they might be eyeing his sack of whatever he'd acquired in the last few hours. Wes scowled at the man from the third floor as he got in his line of fire, and lowered his revolver. "He should be here with us. Doesn't he know who keeps his wages where they are? Or were? It's not like he was born drunk."

"Forget it," Blaine said, looking ashamed for the people below them. "We'll try to keep them safe, do whatever James Connolly says to do, but you can't think any of them will care about us. They don't have enough money to want a republic."

Kurt was silent, because this wasn't his conversation. But he wondered again where Blaine went to school.

"We have to go for people who can read. I'll wire Liberty Hall for more copies of the proclamation today."

"Right," Wes sighed. "I'll go talk to James about..." he gestured disgustedly at the scene outside as he left.

Puck was sitting against a wall, legs splayed out in front of him as he reloaded his gun. "I say we go down there," he announced, "with one more warning. Then we start taking "volunteers" to help build our own barricades."

"We can't impress civilians," Blaine said, but Puck had gotten the attention of a few men, also tired of waiting for clearings in the civilian mass. No one had expected the British's low position point to be an advantage; no one had predicted a shield of looters.

"We just can't, we're supposed to be _protecting_ them from being conscripted," Blaine added, and looked to Kurt for backup.

"I agree. It sounds like the _Times_ is just waiting for you to pull some desperate move like that, and then you've lost whatever ounce of credibility you have left."

It clearly wasn't the angle Blaine would have taken, but it quieted the talk, to his evident relief. When the men disbanded, waiting for the people to do the same but keeping their guns out, Blaine looked back to the window with an expression that was nothing short of miserable. "Thanks," he said to Kurt. "Wes is right, you know. They'd risk their lives to raid Clery's, they'd take their own children to the jeweler's under fire. These people aren't afraid to die."

Shortly after, more than one uniformed soldier emerged from the barricade to disperse the crowd – only to be shot at from the volunteers' side of the street. One of them sent up a dirty look as he skirted back, and Kurt thought he saw a self-important face, a brown head of hair he recognized.

"Hold your fire!" Rachel shouted, and for a few moments the men obeyed. But across the street someone sensed an opportunity: a string of bullets pummeled in, first against the concrete outside and then finding their mark through the windows. Three men dropped before it ended, on Kurt's floor alone. Someone yelled what they all knew instantly: "They've got machine guns!"

The return fire started back immediately, more intense than ever so that it completely drowned out the officers. From his edge Kurt scanned the street for the muzzle of the machine gun, but instead saw a wiry woman on the sidewalk with a coffee brewer in her hands and wearing several hats. She curled over almost as if to protect the brewer, and then she jerked, fell and was still.

And then there was Blaine ten feet from Kurt, squatted on a knee by one of the men hit –older, with greying hair– and signaling for Rachel. She knelt and lifted the man's shirt, shook her head, and kept moving. Blaine appeared undecided. When he gingerly lifted the man's head and back though, and attempted to half-drag, half-carry him to the hallway, he shouted in pain.

Anxiety fixed Blaine's expression. He could no more hurt the man than he could let him lie in the fighting. He rocked back on his heels.

Kurt was over in a matter of seconds.

The man groaned and left a trail of two stripes as they took him, Kurt grunting with the effort of only using one arm, to the telecommunications room Kurt had come to think of as Blaine's. The only place quiet. They closed the door and the man seemed to know why he wasn't headed for the steep, concrete stairs down to the infirmary.

"I haven't been to confession, Blaine," he rasped. "Where's Father Kelly?"

Blaine cringed and looked to Kurt, who was at a loss. "His orders were cancelled too; we're still trying to reach him," Blaine said.

The next sound that came out of the man's mouth was a gargled nothing, and his panicked, tenuous gaze fell on Kurt and his white shirtsleeve. "Are you a priest?"

"What?" he stammered. "No, I –"

"Not yet," Blaine cut Kurt off, laying a hand on his wrist. "He's our chaplain." Then he gave Kurt a pathetic look. _Please_, he mouthed.

And even though Kurt could barely stomach the notion of what Blaine was asking him to do, saying 'no' to him was even further out of the question. Blaine knew this man, Kurt reminded himself. He nodded. Blaine's fingers squeezed ever so lightly.

"This is Kurt Hummel. Chaplain, training ordainee. He'll stay with you. I'll – I'll leave you two alone." He put a hand on the man's chest. "Good-bye, John." He gave Kurt an apologetic, desperate look and left the door open behind him.

Kurt closed his eyes, steeling himself, and then smiled down at the volunteer at his knees.

The man was breathing around blood, now. "It's been two days since my last confession." Easter.

"That's… not so bad." Kurt cringed; that didn't sound remotely right. "I mean, go ahead."

The man's eyes darted from Kurt to the ceiling to the empty air where he probably saw his wife, or his father. There was perspiration above his eyebrows and around his lips, which were chapped but for the line of blood that smeared when he tried to cough and spit it to the floor next to him. He pulled his rosary string from his jacket and reached for Kurt, missing more than once before holding it against Kurt's palm.

What was his name? Blaine had just said it – had _just_ said it. But it was gone, Kurt couldn't remember.

"I killed two men," the man said. "Maybe one of them lived? Maybe both of them did." His eyes were going and coming and going again, and his collar was soaked red. "They may have lived, I think."

"They probably did. We'll… we'll just say you shot them."

"I sh-shot two men I didn't know." The man's shoulders were beginning to spasm. He wasn't breathing enough and there were things lodged into his body.

Kurt thought of the things Wes had said, about families and generations and why they were there. "It's okay, you're okay," he said, quietly. "You're not even here for yourself, are you?"

He had to know he was being lied to then. No priest would say that. There was probably a script. The man wasn't still, wasn't at rest and probably wouldn't be until his heart ran out, but he focused on Kurt a moment. "Eleanor," he said. "It's been two days since my –"

"Shh, I know." Kurt's knees were against the man's side, he was knelt so close, and he put a comforting hand behind his head, elbow over his shoulder. "I… " Kurt swallowed. "You're absolved, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." He should cross himself, or maybe the man? Left to right or right to left?

The man said something garbled and soft. Kurt leaned down further. "What?"

"Amen."

"Oh, yes. Yes. Amen."

"Thank you." The man closed his eyes, breaths rapid and loud.

Kurt looked down helplessly at him, distressed, and settled on just putting one hand flat on the man's chest, blinking back tears and feeling completely inadequate. And he took the man's hand with the other – didn't grasp it, just held it. "I'm sure Eleanor loves you," he said, voice breaking. They sat for a minute, waiting.

The death rattle was the worst thing Kurt had ever heard, and when the man's head fell limply back, the rosary string was left dangling in Kurt's hand.

He looked down. It was something other than dead, so Kurt focused hard on it, anchored to it. The beads were onyx, loose, like they would scatter on the floor if Kurt gave it a good yank. He folded the string once over itself carefully, as if it were precious, and stood up.

Somebody was watching him from the doorway; Kurt felt their eyes. And he knew they were Blaine's, could tell from the way he didn't speak. He turned to him, leaving the body where he was. Anyone else could fix him, because he didn't think he could. "I won't do that again."

"I won't ask you to," Blaine answered, softly. "I'm sorry."

Kurt met him in the doorway and handed him the rosary beads. "They're his."

"What do you want me to do with it?"

"I don't know. I can't keep them, I can't throw them away." Their voices were so low and Kurt shut the door behind them quietly, as if the fighting wasn't still going on in full force out front. As if the man on the other side of the door could be woken up. "Who is he?" Kurt asked.

"He's… a family friend. He and my parents were close before."

Blaine's eyes and voice were completely dry, and Kurt didn't ask before what. "Why would he think that about me?"

Blaine relaxed a little and smiled softly, knowingly. "That you must be in the clergy?" He raised a hand to Kurt's upper arm, guided him a ways away from the door in the corridor. He kept _touching_ him, like they were close, but only for a moment more before he dropped his hand. "He was dying, Kurt, and just look at you."

Kurt glanced up- not the response he expected.

There was the slightest blush across Blaine's cheeks. "I just mean you're… light, you're _fair_. We're all tromping around like there's nothing on earth but this building and the number of people we shoot from inside it. But you…" Blaine shrugged, too nonchalantly to be convincing. "You still know this is crazy. You think like someone who isn't obsessed."

"So what you mean to say is, I'm not one of you."

"What I mean to say is that if I were bleeding on my back and you showed up out of nowhere, I would take one look at your face and assume you'd come to help."

* * *

Kurt wasn't remotely involved for the rest of the afternoon. He stood with Blaine out of sudden habit the next time Wes needed to consult with him and the officers, but both of them were useless on the matter of firearms. And things were getting complicated because the guns available were of as varied and confusing a selection as they could have been. Everyone had different types, different models, a couple even large game rifles they'd collected in South Africa over a decade ago. The older men had pistols from other wars, just dated enough that the new smaller bullets couldn't fire from them.

By the time twenty bodies lay side by side in the basement, Wes had asked – not assigned – Puck to please, for the love of God go down and see if they have any bullets on them. Then it fell to a detail to identify and distribute the ones whose matching guns had been lost. Blaine found somewhere else to make himself useful and Kurt sat with his knees bent, back against a lower wall in the broad third-floor room, and wondered if that's exactly how they'd tell it to their children. _I was on bullet distribution – like morgue duty, only you really had to know your lead._

He'd fallen asleep thinking about dead brothers and coffee brewers and wondering if these boys thought anything about where they'd be in a year. He stirred once and mumbled something at someone, who answered softly.

He woke up later, only now there were others asleep around him and he was lying down in the same spot, and Blaine was saying something.

Oh – Blaine. He was here, saying something.

"What?"

"I said, they're leaving now."

"What?"

"Okay, Kurt, up you get, come on."

It was only then, pushing himself upright, that Kurt realized he had Blaine's speckled grey jacket over his shoulders like half a blanket, and he missed the extra layer between him and the air when it fell away.

"It's after two," Blaine tried starting over, knelt in front of Kurt and whispering. "They're holding off so we can send some girls to deliver our dead men to their families. There's four hours of cease-fire."

Kurt tried to focus, but it was so dark, and he was sleepy. "That's…good."

"Yes," Blaine confirmed. "But if you wanted to try to go out with them, you could."

That helped Kurt awake. "What, sneak out?" he asked, blinking the clouds from his head. "As a girl or a casualty?"

"Oh," Blaine seemed a little taken aback. "The, ah, former I assumed. You'll have to go straight through their territory, and they'll be checking the dead pretty closely, I think. The girls should be okay. If you made it as far as any of the casualties' homes, I think their family would hold you until you could get out safely. Back to Ohio, or wherever."

Kurt hadn't told him about the Royal Academy. Less than a day's journey but a hundred thousand miles away. "And if I got caught?"

"I have no idea. We don't know if they're taking prisoners or what's being done with them." Blaine hesitated, and shifted his weight. "I'm not sure what to tell you, Kurt. You'll have a harder time of things if they catch you disguised, than if they just catch you making a break for it. Not that I'd recommend that, either."

Something that felt like cold water, but really was just the cold, struck down Kurt's back at the prospect of sneaking out now into streets he wouldn't know in the day, alone but for some girl and a dead body, with the British stationed everywhere waiting for just this sort of deception. With men and shadows flitting around, and it seemed like everyone holding a gun was nervous and ready to shoot. "I… maybe I should wait."

Blaine let out a breath Kurt hadn't noticed he'd been holding. Kurt hadn't seen how tense Blaine was until he visibly relaxed, shoulders falling a bit, and he nodded. "Okay," Blaine said, "okay. But I couldn't not ask. Go back to sleep, now, and we'll wait for a better time. We'll wait for a time that's safe."

There was no safe here, Kurt's brain knew; even now there were shots dying in the distance. But it was a weak thought when the building was still and Blaine was talking low to him in the dark. Kurt let himself be guided gently back down, and was just awake enough to register Blaine's expression when Kurt instinctively pulled his sturdy jacket back over his shoulders. He should have given it back to Blaine, perhaps. But in the chilly April night, it was so warm.


	5. Chapter Five

**Title**: Dublin Rising

**Author**: StingInTheBackground

**Genres**: Revolutionary Ireland AU, Romance, Action/Drama, Angst, Historical Fiction

**A/N**: Historical notes on my LiveJournal.

* * *

**Chapter Five**

Kurt leaned his hip against the third floor wall and picked at something that had the markings of Rachel's chefsmanship. The men keeping watch out the windows were quiet across the room. Blaine sat on the floor below him, cap on and the proclamation safely in his lap. He was staring up at Kurt and Kurt chewed his bread patiently, waiting. Blaine's eyes were tired – Kurt had started to wonder when he slept – but locked on him.

"I'm sorry I was rude, when we met," Blaine finally said, ignoring his own breakfast.

Kurt swallowed a mouthful and slid his back down along the wall until he was sitting next to him, arms around his knees, mindful of the sliver of space between them. "What, like three days ago?"

"I yelled at you, to get out. Maybe if I'd been civil, you would have actually gone. You'd be safe."

He looked like he actually regretted it. Kurt didn't like worry lines in Blaine's expression, or the way his dialect slowed into something blander, the more upset he was. "Maybe, but I'm alright."

"Do you know I was actually glad you didn't leave, last night when I woke you up? I should have made you go. You should be at school, or with your parents, or doing whatever it is you do in the States. Not having your eardrums blown out while we shoot at each other."

"Blaine – "

"We're not your problem, and you're stuck here – "

Kurt finally put a hand over his mouth to shut him up. He was glad he didn't think first, or he wouldn't have done it. "Blaine, it's _okay_. I'm okay. Besides, that day you yelled at me? You sort of had the soul of the nation on your shoulders." That got him a weak smile. Thank god the shooting hadn't started up for the day, because Blaine clearly needed to regroup and keep everything from fraying further at the edges. "So," Kurt said, "what's on the agenda today?"

"What makes you think I know? James Connolly – "

"Okay, if _you_ had his job, what would be on the agenda for today?"

Blaine picked absently at the corner of their document, and didn't seem to notice the points of contact between them as his shoulders relaxed next to Kurt. "Well, the looting has to get under control. It has to, or more civilians are going to… It has to. But we don't have the numbers." Blaine rubbed his eye once. "We can barely hold down here, much less police the street. God, if only the rest had _come_. I could kill our comman- our interim commander for that countermand."

"Honestly Blaine, and I know I'm new… but I don't think you could."

"What, _kill_ the head of the volunteers? Of course I couldn't really."

"I mean kill anybody."

Blaine was silent.

So was the general post office, for about a minute more.

It started with a smattering of shots in the distance, something Kurt had gotten used to. But then Blaine groaned and leaned his head back against the wall. "That was from the west."

"So?" Then – oh. There wasn't supposed to be any fighting behind the GPO, in the residential area. Essentially volunteer territory. "Snipers again?"

Blaine shook his head, rolling it against the paneling with his eyes closed. "Don't know." Kurt studied him a moment. Blaine seemed too tired to wonder, or to do anything but wait and assume it was more bad news. Kurt felt a weight of something like protectiveness, or pity, and it was the most natural thing in the world for Kurt to reach out his hand and –

A man in the hallway hurried by, then paused in the doorway and looked at Blaine. Kurt jerked away, shrinking back and going completely still.

"Don't you remember I relieved you from communications an hour ago?" the man said, raising an unscrewed headset as a reminder.

"Of course I do," Blaine said opening his eyes, still seated. "So I cleared out. It's all yours."

"Wesley said you're supposed to be asleep." The man glanced at Kurt, then back at Blaine, who was suddenly easy to irritate.

"If you're covering for me, why don't you go do it?" he snapped. "Or maybe when we miss a wire about those shots, you can tell James Connolly why." The few men and one Cumman na mBan girl who'd been scanning for activity out the windows turned their heads, craning in mild interest. Kurt gathered that Blaine's aggravation was worth noting.

"It's already in," the man reported too casually. Blaine was on his feet in an instant, Kurt next. A number of volunteers edged in, including Puck and a young boy with wrapping knotted and fraying beneath the hem of his shirt. Kurt recognized him – Rory, James Connolly's son, upright at last. The volunteer pulled out a note. "It was the regular police, about two miles back, firing on civilians. About twenty hit."

Blaine's expression matched every other one in the room. "What for?! There're no stores back there, there's nothing to steal."

"They were shot in their homes. A doctor was rounding up some residents to help stop the looting towards our end, but all the royal constabulary caught was that that they were meeting and headed towards Sackville Street. They intercepted them, searched their houses, then killed fifteen of the men. Including the doctor. Three or four wounded."

Blaine groaned. "They thought they were hiding guns."

"Or other men," Kurt pointed out.

Something seemed to occur to Blaine then, that didn't occur to anyone else. "Who was the doctor? What were his last words?"

"Blaine," Kurt said quietly.

"We need them! Why do you think we wanted the telegraph? This is exactly the sort of thing we have to circulate if we want anyone to care about what we're doing." The men were quiet. Blaine looked around, eventually landed on Puck. "Can you contact any of their wives? All of them?"

Puck nodded stiffly, and started towards the hallway before Blaine grabbed his elbow. "Wait. They'll be watching their houses. Put one of the girls in civilian clothes and take her, if you have to. Just be careful." Then he added as an afterthought, "and don't take Rachel. Wes will skin you."

The men dispersed to spread the word, and Blaine had caught his second wind, running on adrenaline and talking as much to himself as to Kurt. "We'll write up an article. Gunning down some doctor in the west end? _Idiots_."

Kurt's stomach dropped at this shrewd side of him. He'd known Blaine was smart, but hadn't seen him quite this… utilitarian. "For someone so upset over those men being killed, you're sure quick to put them to good use. What if it was someone you knew?"

That seemed to derail Blaine's focus and he halted, then pulled Kurt to the side of the room. The men were angry; the fighting would start soon. "What should we do? Let it happen quietly? Let them get away with it?"

"So you're going to trod out their last words? Even their _families_? You're manipulating your own people."

"They need it," Blaine said, but it was clear he wasn't easy either. "We're desensitized, to men being shot in their own streets. Because it happens all the time. Do you understand, Kurt? _All_ the time. The whole city thinks it's normal – that's why we're even here. We have to remind them it's not."

"You're half the reason it's happening now!" Kurt hadn't meant to yell, but didn't stop. "Those men? Those women in the street? _You're_ getting them killed, Blaine. If the royal army gets bored tomorrow and leaves Ireland to itself, they'll still be dead." Blaine cringed, keenly aware. And some part of Kurt, some part that he wasn't proud of, kept going. "It's not enough to be sorry or pretend like they were on your side. What are you going to do to _stop_ it?"

Blaine, whose eyes were already shadowed, turned a sick color as Kurt spoke. He didn't look at Kurt anymore. Five shots went off somewhere, it didn't matter where. Six, seven. Blaine edged aside a few feet, holding his worn proclamation against his chest, as if Kurt might make a swipe for it and stomp it in the ground. "I'm going to go," he said.

He'd wanted Blaine to stick up, to tell him he was wrong. "Where are you going?"

"Somewhere else," Blaine said.

_Away from you_. Kurt had gone too far, it had been too much to lay on him. "Blaine," he said, more softly.

"Forget it," he answered. "You're not wrong." A shout rose up to them from the street, strangled and anonymous. Blaine's jaw was set with something new Kurt hadn't seen moments before. "You're not wrong."

* * *

By mid-day Kurt had stopped wondering where Blaine had slunk off to, knowing sooner or later he'd turn up on some assignment in communications or the infirmary. Instead, Kurt planned on slipping into the smaller sorting room on the first floor and bullying out whoever was in there trying to light up a cigarette out of Rachel's sight. It was only three rooms away from the circular foyer that jutted out from the rest of the building, with the domed sky window. Three rooms from where half the armed volunteers were shooting more recklessly than ever, with the murder of fifteen new Dubliners spurring them on. But the sorting room was in a corner, and too cramped for fighting. Kurt could shut the door, cover his ears, and be alone.

At least, that's what he'd expected. What he'd found was Puck leaning against a wall swiping his gun with a cloth and Rory kneeling on the floor looking out a pair of binoculars steadied on the window-sill, saying something Kurt couldn't remotely understand. Kurt sighed and turned back, thinking he'd hole away in the telegraph room upstairs – maybe even talk to Blaine.

"Where do you think you're going?" Puck said. Rory looked up from the black and bronze binoculars and Puck gestured between him and Kurt. "America, this is Connolly's kid. Connolly's kid, America."

Kurt rolled his eyes. "Kurt Hummel."

"Rory." He was small, probably the youngest boy Kurt had seen in the ranks. He added something in a thick, fast accent that made Kurt feel awkward and slow, and when Rory realized he wasn't going to get a response he went directly back to scanning the street.

Kurt nearly apologized, but wasn't sure what for, so instead he asked, "Why are you two in here?"

"Machine gun duty," Puck said. "Every time they start up they mow five of us down because we don't know it's coming. So Rory and me do nothing but look for the tripods going up. Then I shoot while Rory sounds the alarm. Pretty important stuff, right Rory?"

"Mm-hm." It was no shock to Kurt that Rory wasn't as easy to excite – his father was James Connolly after all, elusive and idolized. Puck gave him an exaggeratedly dead-pan look for being a spoilsport.

They all looked out at the British barricade, where the muzzles of guns poked out, firing into the main GPO rooms fifteen yards over and up on the third floor. Occasionally a barrel tilted and then slid out of its compartment as a volunteer's bullet found its mark. Most of what was worth looting on the block had been stripped or burned, but children skirted around the edges of the barricades and street blocks, pulling at the doors of upturned vehicles and shouting across the length of the barricade to one another as they foraged for wooden planks, or merchandise, or god knows what. Puck shook his head. "And keep an eye out for Blaine. We'll need to warn folks about him, too."

Kurt snapped to attention. "For Blaine? What does that mean?"

"Well, he was scrubbing up a good forty-five minutes ago. I'm sure he's out there by now."

"Dairies," Rory said behind the binoculars, or something along those lines, and Puck hurried to the window.

"What does that _mean_?!" Kurt said, looking from one to the other, bewildered.

"There. He. Is," Rory repeated, pointing down the road as he held the binoculars to Puck. But Kurt was much faster. He hadn't used binoculars in years, since his father thought he might take an interest in camping – Kurt had asked if they could take them to a cantata in Columbus. Now, he focused the center rod towards South Sackville, and let out a sound of shock. As the picture sharpened, Blaine came into Kurt's view, even as the image shook in his disbelief. Blaine was in the street, less than a quarter mile away, walking casually to the disaster scene in a fully new outfit – a beige sweater and bow-tie, hair slicked to the side as if he had nothing to do that day but look good and stroll down war-torn Sackville Street.

"What's he doing?!" Kurt shrieked, and shouldered Puck away when he reached for the binoculars. Puck threw up his hands and Rory blinked at them, calmly watching. Kurt couldn't make out Blaine's expression and didn't have time anyway; he shoved the focals towards Puck and made it two steps to the doorway before Puck seized the material of his shirt, sending him stumbling at an angle and cradling his injured arm. "Let go!"

"You'll get him killed," Puck informed him, and let go when he had Kurt's attention. "Look at you. Don't take this the wrong way, but you fit right in. Even if you made it out of here alive with your arm all busted up, you'd blow his cover if you took one step towards him. Just let him do his thing, newbie."

"Didn't he tell you he was going?" Rory said, slowly, for Kurt's benefit. "They told me you two are joined at the hip."

Somehow in the middle of everything, Puck found this particularly amusing, and only more so when Kurt flushed and didn't answer. Puck went to warn the company Blaine was on his way, and Kurt looked back out the window. Blaine was so close now, under forty yards away and veering subtly towards the near side of the barricade, looking as clueless and interested as Kurt had felt that first day, when he wandered up the GPO steps. Only, Blaine wandered to the edge of the British territory, hands in his pockets as he approached the peripheral edge of piled furniture and wooden and steel beams that curved and stuck out like whale bones. He wasn't in the line of fire, not yet, not with the soldiers concentrated in front of the main GPO entrance. He squatted down in front of a child, seven or eight, who was carrying a knapsack.

Puck had been gone a few moments and although the shooting from the volunteer side remained steady, it seemed to redirect just so. Maybe the officers couldn't keep everyone calm in the face of looters and murders in the neighborhood, but none of the volunteers would shoot anywhere near Blaine. Kurt took up the binoculars again and found him.

He was speaking to the boy, who opened the tie of his sack and proudly displayed the contents so Blaine could look in. His response made the child smile and then Blaine gave him a light shove towards the way he'd come, down South Sackville. The boy called out something completely inaudible for the bullets, but a young girl materialized from the barricade. She watched Blaine as she passed him and joined her brother. A number of others went after them, sensing someone with money, someone with authority, was on the outside of the barricade now – it was no longer a _complete_ free-for-all.

And all the while, gunfire.

Kurt's heart was in his throat as he waited for a soldier to notice Blaine. But either none of them did, or they believed he was simply a well-to-do citizen idiot, come to send away the children from the warzone. Already he was telling off a teenager in a cap who was stealing a full tire from a windowless automobile; the boy gave him a dirty look but skuliked away, shouting something over his shoulder that didn't faze Blaine. How could it when there were other kids, when a girl stood crying, stuck in the points and splinted beams with something glinting clutched in her hand?

The volunteers continued to shoot at the barricade even as Blaine skirted closer to its center, holding out a calming palm towards her, _steady_. They could hardly stop shooting, Kurt reminded himself. Blaine wasn't supposed to be important.

But he was. And there he was in broad daylight, nothing but the soldiers' own barricade barring him from their direct sight. Kurt adjusted the binoculars, feeling the cool bronze against his overheating cheeks and his own pounding heartbeat in his chest.

A large piece of furniture dislodged near the girl and sent a few planks bumping down a ways. Blaine must have sensed he was running out of time because he'd taken to yelling to the remaining children as he waded into the barricade towards her, no longer supposing he wasn't noticed. He shouted authoritative, aggressive things at the more stubborn children; Kurt could hear them even as he watched through the lenses. Most of the stragglers finally, finally scattered, although the girl was still four feet off the ground with a gash in her cheek. Moments after Blaine hauled her up, barely balanced, and unceremoniously tossed her over a ridge of material to the solid fine gravel of the street, the furniture caved into the barricade, bringing down a good six-foot stretch with it.

Kurt saw the soldier well before Blaine, who was stumbling out from the barricade and only seemed to just realize he was in a much worse position than seconds before.

The soldier was almost unrealistically tall.

"Him?!" Kurt hissed, lowering the binoculars after he saw the first soldier to reach Blaine. It was, by no possible accident, the one named Smythe.

"Easy," came Puck's voice to his left, and Kurt jumped.

The captain left his gun holstered, but ordered Blaine back, towards the street a few steps, so that he shielded Smythe from most of the angles in the GPO. Smythe was smart. They were both still; he must have been speaking. And then Blaine turned around, facing the post office, and placed his hands behind his head. Then the man's hands were on either side of him, feeling. His side, his hips.

A jolt of something white hot seared through Kurt at the soldier touching him, frisking him. "Can't you do something?" Kurt demanded of Puck, panicked. "Aren't you covering for him?"

"Easy," was the answer again. Puck had his gun out but didn't look like he expected to use it. "I guarantee you Blaine doesn't have anything on him. The second one of us shoots at that Brit, we might as well take down Blaine with him."

Rory subtly dispossessed Kurt of the binoculars, sensing they were more harm than good at this point, and kept watch himself. "He's letting him go."

Kurt's jaw dropped. Puck pushed at his shoulder once. "What'd I tell you. Lucky Blaine cleans up so good."

Kurt shook his head. "That soldier knows Blaine's not a civilian. He knows him; he saw him read out your document Monday."

Blaine was headed back down Sackville on the British side, hands pocketed again but moving more quickly, glancing over his shoulder. Captain Smythe waved off a couple onlooking soldiers, but then Blaine casually made a terrible mistake.

He began to cross the street.

Four steps in the direction of the volunteer's side of the road was enough of an indictment to the soldier nearest to the captain. Smythe shouted no, gestured harshly and cursed at his own cohort even as one of them raised his gun.

Blaine didn't know he was finally a target until the first shot. But when it narrowly missed he didn't look back again before taking off, sprinting, his small body hurtling the rest of the way across the broad graveled street. The first soldier to shoot was hit from the volunteers' side, and another soldier took over. _Go, Blaine, go, go, go._ Kurt's insides felt like pure liquid, and he barely heard the shots that should have burst in his ears from Puck's gun, as Puck swore violently too.

A moment's indecision sent Blaine veering down Sackville for a few more yards, then back towards the corner block of the GPO. The zig-zag sent a few bullets into the next building over, probably saving his life. Kurt almost _felt_ when Blaine finally chose his route, a huddled, speedy blur towards the side of the building, and Kurt flew out of the sorting room. If the nearest side door was closed when Blaine reached it, or worse, locked, he was dead. He saw Wes running his way from the far end of the hallway, but Kurt was closer, through the side foyer now, and the instructions shouted at him, the disorienting layout of the floor, the pain screaming from his arm all meant nothing.

The door was riddled with bullet holes from the week's skirmishes and it was heavy, but Kurt could have pulled it off its hinges if he'd had to. He flung it back and the deadened blasts sharpened in his ears for a moment, followed by a terrifying second of nothing. And then there was a body, Blaine's body through the doorway crashing into him, warm and solid and alive, and as two shots whizzed in a few meters high, they drew each other flat against the wall in frantic terror until they'd cleared the doorway. Kurt slammed it closed, staying low until the last futile bullet hit the outside and then it was quiet, nothing but the steady firing out front and their own breathing.

They were alive, knelt low beside the secure doorway. Kurt was completely still, listening for close shots over Blaine's heavy breaths to his left. No more shots came.

Wes was in the foyer's doorway to the hall, pale and jarred, with one hand on his forehead. He opened his mouth, but for once didn't seem sure what he wanted to say. For some reason that didn't register past the fear and relief in Kurt's bones, Wes was looking at _him_, not Blaine. He took a step backwards into the hallway, holding out a hand to Puck and the others who hurried towards the foyer. "He's okay, hold off," he told them, and gave Kurt another inscrutable look.

"Lock the door," he said then, and disappeared.

It was just them. Kurt finally looked square at Blaine as, for second time that day, he found himself seated against the wall next to him. Only now, Blaine was trembling with adrenaline and his chest was heaving from the sprint, and he flexed and unflexed his hands into fists. The April air was cool on his sweater, which moved against Kurt's side as Blaine controlled his breathing. Kurt put a hand over his and the fidgeting stilled.

"You're not hurt?" he said. "You're alright?"

Blaine nodded.

"What I said before, you know that's not what I meant. When I said you…"

Blaine licked his lips, which were completely dry. "What didn't you mean?"

"I didn't mean _you_ were getting civilians killed. I didn't want _you_ to go and…"

Blaine snorted, looked away. "Who else, then? I'm the only one here who can't shoot anyone. Who else should be doing the soft work?"

"Soft work! How can you say that?" Kurt moved to his knees, facing Blaine and bending down until he made eye contact. "I'm not saying it was a smart thing to do, and I'm angry with you for slipping away without telling me, and I hope Wes chains you to the telegraph table after this. But you know you probably saved some of those kids' lives." Kurt pretended not to notice the tips of Blaine's ears – they were just coloring from the run in the chill.

Blaine smiled and absent-mindedly dragged his thumb along the back of Kurt's hand. "Thanks. It doesn't stop the adults, the looting down the street."

"I won't guilt you into single-handedly fixing that too, don't worry. I'm sorry for what I said to you earlier." Kurt didn't know when he'd gotten so bold, but he held Blaine's hand in both his own, firmly. And then, because Blaine wasn't answering, only stared at their hands together and then back to Kurt's eyes, Kurt went on: "A shame you got your sweater all wrinkled and dirty, though. You make a great regular person."

Kurt thought he'd broken through when Blaine finally laughed. It was a wonderful sound Kurt hadn't heard enough of, and for a second Blaine almost looked content. "Maybe someday soon, I will," he answered, and the thought seemed to make him pause. "Kurt – "

But then a shout went up from the front room and Wes's voice gave out an urgent order; an officer had been hit. It was like a missed note, jarring Blaine from something he'd almost recognized. His expression fell back into something worse than anxiety, into sorrow and regret, and he pulled his hand away from Kurt's.

Then there was all that space between them, only an inch more but far too much, because then Blaine stood up.

"What's the matter?" Kurt demanded, still on the floor.

"Nothing," Blaine said, but then he paced a few steps away and a few steps back. "No – everything is. I'm sorry. I have to go. They need me." Blaine looked to the hallway, where the pop of revolvers and the thunder of rifles rang in a steady reminder the world wasn't right-side-up. Footsteps shuffled, carrying wounded men; firing directions sounded in from opposite sides of the front area. It was all the sound of desperate fellowship, and Kurt watched it press in on Blaine as if it came from all sides. "_They_ need me," Blaine said again, almost pleading. He took a few steps back, as if he had something to be wary of on his way out, and then turned unsteadily out of the foyer, out of their moment and back into Ireland.

Kurt could feel his own pulse pounding between his ears as he watched him go.

He was alone.

* * *

**A/N:** If any Irish, British, or maybe even American readers have thoughts about how the Easter Rising is being illustrated through the Glee characters, I hope you'll let me know. It's really tricky using sensitive historical topics in a fic, especially a love story, but I'd love feedback on how you think I'm doing if you're familiar with this history. (And if you're not - hey, welcome! Have fun.) The next couple chapters are mostly Klainey, but the Rising gets really serious soon, so I want to be on top of it. Thanks - SitB


	6. Chapter Six

**Title**: Dublin Rising

**Author**: StingInTheBackground

**Genres**: Revolutionary Ireland AU, Romance, Action/Drama, Angst, Historical Fiction

**A/N**: If any Irish, British, or maybe even American readers have thoughts about how the Easter Rising is being illustrated through the Glee characters, I hope you'll let me know. It's really tricky using sensitive historical topics in a fic, especially a love story, but I'd love feedback on how you think I'm doing if you're familiar with this history. (And if you're not - hey, welcome! Have fun.) This chapter and the next are mostly Klainey, but the Rising gets really serious soon, so I want to be on top of it. Thanks - SitB

* * *

**Chapter Six**

Wes had said, "he's fine, Kurt, just keep looking."

The nights were beginning to take a toll on the volunteers, with the tight quarters and quiet hours spent listening to bodies being shuttled out during the designated cease-fires. No matter how quick the men were to rile in the day, there was simply nothing to shoot at in the dark, and they settled to nothing but nerves and impatient silence, seated along the walls and listening just in case. The nervousness was seeping into Kurt's head – everywhere he looked were men and girls, and blown out windows, and bullet casings littering the floor. He thought of the music in the London evenings; he thought of the easy conversations off the streets in Lima. Dublin was eerie.

It was also under martial law. If the city didn't hate the volunteers before, he had to assume they did now.

Kurt had left the front lobby. He hadn't seen Blaine since the afternoon, and Kurt Hummel would not be avoided. He went to the telegraph room, then scanned the broad third floor. Then the infirmary, and the restrooms in a last ditch effort. For one panicked moment he thought Blaine must have left the GPO again.

Wes was in an argument with Rachel when Kurt interrupted, and he gave him a brusque, annoyed glance. "He's fine, Kurt, just keep looking."

"Don't snap at him!" Rachel said, and Kurt didn't stay for the rest of _that_ particular exchange.

When he found Blaine, he was on the roof, reading a paperback copy of _The Importance of Being Earnest_ and eating a chicken pot pie.

Kurt froze half-way outside with his chest sticking up from the ladder climb-out, feeling a misty drizzle on his face, and stared at him. "Where the hell did you get that?"

"My copy. Sorry, Rory's got it next." Blaine dabbed with a spoon at the pie, which sat on a makeshift trivet of a folded-up newspaper. _ Special Edition: Third Day of City's Destruction_. He hadn't looked at Kurt yet. "Oh, you mean the food. We heisted a bakery, remember? Rachel was dishing pies out to the wounded and one of them has a five-year old, lives around here. After I got back from the street today, he was pretty adamant I take his." He shrugged. Then whatever upbringing Blaine had had seemed to catch up to him, and his eyes snapped up to Kurt for the first time. "Do you want it?"

"No, Blaine."

"Here, I don't even like chicken, you take it."

Kurt ignored him, because sometimes that was the easiest way, and surveyed where they were. The top of the GPO was barely lit by the street-lamps below, and the low wall around the perimeter of the building's roof funneled any yellow glow from the city past where he and Blaine sat. Blaine was seated with the top of his cap a few safe inches from the top of the wall. The post office was the tallest building in the city, so it was all low clouds behind him, and one or two stars. He had gone back to avoiding Kurt's eyes. So Kurt made his way over on his hands and knees, and it wasn't until he turned and sat next to Blaine that Kurt saw the flag.

It was large, an awkward rectangle and plain green. But the words IRISH REPUBLIC had been carefully painted in golden and white letters that caught what little light reached them from the Dublin, below. The breeze kept it rippling at an angle, almost lazily.

At the base of the pole was the Union Jack their flag had replaced, folded but askew on the ground. "You left that up here?" Kurt asked.

"I was being sniped at from two locations. Anyway what would I have done with it, mailed it back to England?"

With that Blaine withdrew a degree again, looking back to his book.

Kurt nearly cleared his throat, and just barely didn't. "…So." He cast about for a moment. "I wouldn't have expected a waiting list for a book in the middle of a siege."

"Not much else to do at night but stare at each other," Blaine said.

"Maybe you should have commandeered a library."

"We needed the telegraph."

"I was kidding. Blaine, did I do something to make you angry?"

"…No." Blaine let the paperback fall shut but he didn't look surprised. A little guilty. "No, of course you didn't." He closed his eyes as if the dark of nothing were less troubling than the dark of the night out on the roof. "Look, I don't know how to say this; it's going to sound worse than I mean it."

Kurt's stomach dropped in a sickening way that left his muscles straining. He should have known; he _did_ know. He almost raised a hand to tell Blaine please to stop, leave it, but then a distant machine-like groan reached their ears from somewhere in the city.

They both froze, brows furrowed, and then heard it again.

"Wait," Blaine said before Kurt could peek over the low wall around the roof. He pushed Kurt down even lower, gently, and kept his hand on his shoulder. Kurt held his breath; he would never get used to those casual hands maneuvering him about. Blaine raised the empty pan he'd been eating from so that it stood sideways up from the roof, exposed to the streets below.

Nothing.

They peered over the concrete wall for the source of the long, low sound, and looked down South Sackville, along the speckles of light on the River Liffey to the southeast where the river opened up to the sea. Through the fuzzying mist, they saw a shadow, elongated but broad, that spanned a third of the width of the Liffey and made its way from the sea into the mouth of the river. A ship, too large to be anything but the Royal Army, was quietly penetrating Dublin.

It was slow and ominous, even from a mile and a dozen streets away. Blaine drew in a slow breath. In the dark, Kurt could see from the shift of the point of light in Blaine's eyes that he was scanning the length of the boat, considering, calculating how many soldiers it could contain. Some hundreds at least – and this was only the first to arrive.

A number of piddling reverberations pitched out from the near side of the river: the volunteers at Liberty Hall were firing, perhaps gunshots and grenades. They were nothing but sparks from Kurt and Blaine's position, small crackling sparks against a pure metal mass. No shots were fired back; it sailed straight by, unstoppable. It finally came to a glacial stop half-way between the city hall and the Sackville Bridge, docked near the far edge of the quay, out of range of Liberty Hall. And there, for a few still moments, then a solid ten minutes, then an immeasurable time that stretched out, it remained a still shadow. Kurt expected British reinforcements to flood out. For now, it waited, completely armored.

Sixty feet above the imploding city, on the top of the GPO, Blaine folded his arms over the rain-wet wall and dropped his head. The mist and gel in his hair caught what little moonlight made it through the clouds, and Kurt watched his torso move as he breathed, eyes closed against his forearm over the concrete.

"Should you tell James Connolly?" Kurt asked softly. But even then, a grumble of activity rushed through the floor beneath them; they heard the thud of footsteps from through the climb-out. The third floor lookouts would have seen; they all knew.

Blaine raised his head and squinted, thinking aloud. "Why would they unboard on the other side of the river? They have to know we're covering the bridges. The only thing on the other side is Stephen's Green. And…" Blaine's eyes widened. "Trinity."

"Trinity… College?" Kurt craned his neck, but of course all the buildings were a dark nothing on the other side of the river. "You don't have any men in the college."

"We don't. So they could take it in a second," Blaine said grimly. "Heck, I should want them to; we could _use_ five hundred young people turned out of their dorms and pissed. And they're smart, the students, they know what it all means. I just… they're only students. They're so young."

"So are you."

Blaine hadn't made the first move to go downstairs; he looked again towards the boat and beyond it, towards the college. Kurt sensed this was important. "Are you a student, Blaine?"

"No," he confessed, quietly. "But before all this… I would have enrolled. I wanted to sing. Before this, Trinity was just about _all_ I wanted."

"Not anymore?"

"Well, no. Everything's different now." He finally shifted away from the south city so they both sat with their backs to the wall, facing the climb-out hole while the volunteers moved about beneath them. There was nothing they could do for now. "I'm lucky to be here, with Wes, but we can't expect a new Ireland if we won't make sacrifices for it. Independence is everything. Or at least, it was." Blaine swallowed and looked at Kurt. "At least, it should be."

It was hard to hold Blaine's gaze. No one had ever looked at Kurt that way, no one's eyes lingered on his and then drifted down to his mouth and collarbone. But Kurt knew enough about longing to hope he recognized it now; it made it all the more difficult to stomach the passivity and resignation that took over Blaine's expression when he remembered himself. Blaine closed his eyes, tilted his head back against the concrete, and when he opened them again they fell on the broad, green flag rippling from its pole.

"It doesn't matter what I want."

* * *

It was painful to listen to Blaine oscillate, but downstairs Kurt felt almost as sorry for Wes, who was trying his damnedest to keep the rest of the volunteers from going to sleep scared. The ship wasn't so enormous that its simple presence would terrify a battalion of able men in a well-defended base; but the ease with which it cruised into their city drained most of the momentum the civilian massacre and Blaine's heroics had built that afternoon. Liberty Hall was impotent, and Trinity College was vulnerable.

So Blaine had said "give me five minutes."

"To do what?" Wes asked.

"To get them angry again."

He'd said it like it was self-evident, and even Wes tilted his head and blinked a moment as Blaine hopped up to stand on the seat of a chair backed against the wall, between the desks piled aside. Of course he had the entire third floor's attention immediately. And within himself Kurt didn't know if it was a great idea, but Blaine had barreled headfirst into everything he did all day, and Wes let him start speaking. There wasn't time for the tremor of emotion, now. Although the document was folded as always in his back pocket, this song wasn't for independence, but for the sake of men who'd be overrun if they fell into despair during the night.

Could twenty thousand soldiers make Ireland give itself up? _No!_

Were they afraid of the men who mowed down Dubliners in their homes? _No!_

"And we've got a full day ahead to let them know!" Blaine vaulted up onto the top of a dark stained desk, squatting to pound a beat into the mahogany that was picked up immediately by the men. Kurt slipped towards the back wall, putting some distance between him and the room as it came back to life. Wes backed off too, happy to give the reigns to Blaine for the moment.

_In Dublin Town they murdered them_

_Like dogs they shot them down_

_A curse upon your English Thames_

_God strike your London Town!_

A cheer went up, an angry one, and Blaine gauged the leap to another desk pushed along the wall. As he made it though, and the room started on the next verse, a single bullet whizzed in from – where? – over Blaine's head. And he cursed, "oh, _shit_," as he lost his own focus and tumbled from the next desk to the floor.

The room was startled, and everyone bent low.

There were no more shots, and the chatter only started again when Blaine straightened up, alarmed and crouched but very much whole.

Puck's voice came from the back of the room, near Kurt, as he appeared in the doorway. "Hey, everyone, heads up that we have a sniper on the east side. Rachel's on it, but just, you know. Keep low."

Blaine got fully back to his feet, well aware of the eyes on him. "Good to know," he said sardonically, brushing off his trousers, bow-tie lopsided, and a ripple of laughter broke through the floor, a relief. The eerie calm from the arrival of the ship was broken, and Wes let the men disperse as they were. A couple of Cumann na mBan approached Blaine to demand he prove he wasn't hurt.

Kurt craned his neck from his post along the back wall, satisfied that Blaine was alright – just a bit of an idiot. The room thinned as people got back to their business.

He didn't notice Wes until he was right next to him with his arms crossed. Kurt jumped. "Jesus."

"Look," Wes said. "Everyone loves Blaine."

"Mm-hm."

"And we need him. But frankly, he's starting to second-guess himself. And then over-compensate. He's almost becoming…." They both looked to Blaine and the girls, who had rolled up his sleeve and revealed a massive bruise on his upper arm he apparently didn't realize he had.

Kurt's tone was dry. "A liability."

"Yes. And I can't help but blame you. You guys are friends, I get it. But now isn't the time to be getting attached." He kept going before Kurt could protest. "I'm not saying you've done anything wrong."

"Let me guess. I haven't done anything wrong, but stay away from him."

"I'm not going to tell you what to do. But I'll tell him, as a friend or his officer, if doesn't keep it together. Just giving you a heads up." He nodded, ready to leave.

"Wes," Kurt said, before he went, and dropped his voice. "Is it because I'm gay?"

He looked thoughtful for a moment – there was no question Kurt was getting an honest answer. "I didn't make that assumption, no," Wes said. "More because _he_ is, which I'm guessing you know. And because apparently, you're a pretty big distraction."

* * *

Rachel snorted. "Yeah, I guess that's one way to put it."

They were in the kitchen, early the next morning. Liberty Hall had evacuated during the night, and most of them had sprinted for the GPO, which was already well over capacity. Breakfast took more hands, today.

Rachel molded a slab of flour into a biscuit, eyeing Kurt's technique. "Wes was right about one thing, though. Blaine's going to get himself hurt."

"You think?" Kurt knew he shouldn't sound so irritated, not at her. "But I don't see why it's on me. Why I'm the problem. Wes didn't _mind_ Blaine rallying up everyone with snipers outside. He didn't _mind_ him traipsing through the street under fire to help those kids."

"Mind? Um, have you met Wes? He loved it. As long as it's for some random Irish strangers he'll never meet, he'll think there's no better cause." Her voice made the words bitter – that took Kurt by surprise. "But if Wes thinks Blaine's losing sight of Ireland, well, there it is. That's a problem. Of course he doesn't want you worming your way into Blaine's head. Not when they've been planning this… thing… for six months. Not when they're serving under people like James Connolly."

"They? Aren't you, too?"

She huffed. "Something like that."

"Who are you here for, then?"

Rachel had to think on it for a moment, considering Kurt. "Only if you don't tell. You can't try to use it against me."

"How could I possibly – "

"Pinky swear."

It was a strange relief to laugh at the ridiculousness of locking floured pinkies in the middle of a war zone. Rachel was lighter, brighter, than the rest, and Kurt was glad she was there. "Let me ask you," she said, and her voice had never sounded more distinctly American and familiar to Kurt's ears. "If you were good at something you loved, and you were the only one who could do it, wouldn't you go just about anywhere it took you?"

"I _am_ good at something." Kurt lowered his voice. "I'm a first year at the Royal Academy of Music. But singing doesn't… it doesn't hurt anyone. Doesn't kill anyone. You're telling me you'd haul around here shooting at those men just because you're good at it?"

"Okay, first off, Mr. University, you're not the only one with a voice. Secondly," she insisted when Kurt opened his mouth, "I wasn't talking about my shooting, which yes, is flawless."

"What are you doing here, then?"

"I'm taking care of him, of course."

"You're… of who?"

She leveled her gaze, as if she shouldn't have to answer.

"Wes?"

Her expression changed a fraction just at his name.

How had Kurt not noticed before?

"I'm from New York," she said. "And I'm not some globe-trotting freedom fighter. I think the rest of you got a pretty good deal out of it, right? No one else could have taken out that sniper with one shot."

"So you and Wes, you're…"

"No," she said. "We're not."

"Then why…?"

"Look, you wanted to know why I'm here and I told you." She pounded a fist into the flour once, unnecessarily hard. Kurt glanced from her working hands to her eyes. "When Wes says it's not the time to get attached, it's because he thinks he knows from experience," she said, speaking down, almost to the biscuit. "Now why don't you go worry about _your_ boy, and screw his head back on straight."

"Rachel..."

She ignored him, surveying her perfectly round, squat circle. "If Wes wants to take care of Blaine, he shouldn't be trying to scare you off. Since you don't shoot, we should put you on Blaine duty. You can reign him in."

"What could I possibly do?"

She smiled, slyly.

"What – _oh_." Kurt felt his cheeks burning. "I – I couldn't. Anyway Blaine wouldn't… he'd never…"

"Oh, please," she said, scooting closer to him happily, as if there were no better place for gossip. "I think you're causing some sort of identity crisis for him. Four days ago he would have gone down with this place in _flames_, and now he spends half his time worrying if you're okay. Give me another week and I honestly think I could convince him to go with you when you leave. But not if you're going to be all frigid about it."

"I'm… pretty sure you're contradicting your ranking superior," Kurt tried to tease, but his voice came out high and embarrassing. He hadn't fully let himself think about Blaine in that way, not really, had nipped those thoughts every time. The Blaine he knew wore three layers and lived and breathed for the Irish Republic. That's all Kurt had a right to know. Blaine's own best friend had made that perfectly clear.

Rachel prattled on. "Who, Wesley? Oh, he's only a lieutenant. Anyway we're not talking independence, we're talking boys. I'm like a brigadier-general. Don't tell him I said that." She set their biscuits in a line on a portable stove rack. "Hey, are you still listening to me?"

Yes, he told her, and he was – sort of. But the image of Blaine had crept back along the edges of his mind, not for the first time but more terrifyingly clear and insistent. Hazel-brown eyes, arms that were absolutely never still. A beautiful untrained Irish voice. Kurt barely noticed Rachel's amused expression and didn't pretend to care what she said next; Wes and Rachel, the ship and snipers, even Blaine's own blinders that blotted out life beyond the GPO fell short of the material point that Kurt couldn't un-realize:

There was a body inside that bloodied off-white shirt; there was a _person_ inside that volunteer. And yes, Kurt wanted him.

* * *

**A/N:** Thanks, guys. Feedback is always appreciated!


	7. Chapter Seven

**Title**: Dublin Rising

**Author**: StingInTheBackground

**Genres**: Revolutionary Ireland AU, Romance, Action/Drama, Angst, Historical Fiction

**A/N**: This is by far the Klainiest chapter yet - but don't worry, history geeks! Plenty more for you to come.

* * *

**Chapter 7**

Of course, there were more than just men on the ships.

When the first explosion went off two unoccupied buildings down from the GPO, the volunteers didn't know to assume the absolute worst. Wes made a calming, flattening gesture to Blaine and supposed the Royal Army had overshot with a grenade from behind the barricade, or the volunteers had mishandled another bomb in the back of the post office. But after the second explosion, which shook the entire block from the other side, it was clear:

They were going to be shelled.

Reports came in soon after. The _Helga_ on the river was a gunboat. But the second misfire afforded a respite for the GPO, during which the ship went after Liberty Hall instead, much closer to the river, much further from the British barricade. The GPO returned to its battle with the soldiers across the street, but within an hour the smoke from Liberty Hall was impossible to miss. The riverside station of the Irish Republic had fallen, and Dublin's city hall with it.

"It's okay," Blaine said to Kurt, quietly. "Well, not _okay_, the unions need that building, but remember our men evacuated during the night. It should be empty."

Kurt nodded and pretended not to be unnerved by the pluming smoke, rising up from the building that was flattened out of their sight. "Better an empty building than Trinity College, I guess."

"Absolutely," Blaine said earnestly. "I know some of the students; this could be the push they need. Think how loud it must be down there, and Trinity will've seen our city hall being blasted up. I bet you anything we'll have a hundred students at our back door before tonight. If they don't go after the ship themselves."

"Themselves? Wouldn't that be sort of… catastrophic?"

Blaine considered this. "Well, yes. Let's hope they come here."

* * *

In the afternoon, the British army straightened out their coordinates and began to shell the general post office. The first volley, the first real, deadly volley of heavy artillery, killed more volunteers than the past six hours of shooting. Kurt knew because it was taking Puck longer than ever to sort through the dead's guns and bullets, and because they had to stop covering the bodies with sheets, reserving them for the wounded. The next shell fell short of the building and blasted a hole in the roof of the draper's three offices away. And so the attack continued, imprecise but aggressive, until every block of mid-Sackville Street had some laceration, some bombed out edge that smoked. The GPO, broad and sturdy, assimilated most of the impact and watched the exposure of the smaller commercial buildings' interiors, beneath it.

The explosive sounds were terrifying and constant. After a few hours, Wes had apparently had enough of feeling vulnerable. "How will they possibly justify shelling out the whole street trying to get us? The whole city center? Half of it is _British_ commerce! Where's the reason?"

But reason was even less in play now than it had been four long days ago, when Kurt dazedly stepped foot in the building. Blaine put a reassuring hand on Kurt's shoulder, but spoke to the lieutenant. "More importantly, how have we not shut down that ship yet? It's sitting right there."

Their answer came within the hour, in the form of a late volunteer who had evacuated the city hall with the prescience to hang behind and scout the river before smuggling up north to the GPO. He had been escorted in by two lookouts, demanding to see James Connolly, and the next time Kurt saw him he was handing the most recent _Irish Times_ to Wes on the third floor rotunda room. Kurt and Blaine read over Wes's shoulder.

_The Royal forces have stationed the HMY Helga in a secure quay and, with the help of a volunteer citizens' corps, repositioned their base an eighth-mile south, in Trinity College Dublin. The gallant conduct is to be commended of the students remaining on-campus during this holiday, who prepared the university to double as barracks and made possible the erection of six artillery firers, which at the time of this last edition have begun to target the insurgents' headquarters on Sackville Street._

"Citizens' corps? The students are helping the army?" Kurt said, side-eyeing Blaine on Wes's other side. "_Trinity's_ shelling us?"

Wes turned his head to his right where Blaine was at his shoulder, staring at the paper. "No," Blaine said, taking a shallow step away, eyes still locked on the text. "No, that's definitely a lie."

"Blaine…"

"They're making that up." Blaine wiped his palms on his pants. "The college kids? There's no way. Dublin's all messed up, but it's still got a soul. I have to go."

"What? Blaine!" Wes called after him, but it was Kurt who followed him down the hallway, and the door to the communications room hadn't fully closed behind Blaine when Kurt pushed it back open, and saw him pulling one arm through the sleeve of his jacket.

"You're not going out there," Kurt said.

"I'm going to Trinity. Some of those guys are my friends, I have to talk with – "

"_Blaine_."

It was the first harsh word Kurt had said to him. And he hated the way Blaine stopped what he was doing and looked up with his brows drawn, but a loose shell erupted a few streets away, like thunder that moved the foundations and cemented Kurt's resolve.

"I wasn't asking why you want to go. I'm telling you why you're not."

And just like that, there was a crackle in the air that was new.

Blaine set his cap back down slowly on the desk, eyes on him, but kept his jacket on. It was presumptuous, an invasion of space for Kurt to close the door and move directly in front of him, but he needed Blaine to listen. He needed him to focus. "You can't do anything about the shelling, Blaine. The students have made their choices. You can't go down there. If you go out the front, the soldiers on the street will tear you apart after that stunt you pulled yesterday, and we don't know the sniper situation out back."

Blaine let out a low, impatient sound, but couldn't argue with him. Kurt stayed calm, and quiet, and reached to pull Blaine's jacket from off his shoulders and slowly down his arms as he spoke. "If you made it out of here, you wouldn't make it down the road. If you made it down the road, you wouldn't make it across the river. And if you made it across the river, there is no way in hell you'd get into Trinity with a whole boatload of soldiers marching around."

Blaine slumped, resting his backside against the telegraph desk and took his balled-up jacket back from Kurt when he handed it to him. He let it fall to the desk and gripped the edge of the table top on either side of him. "What do we do, then?"

Of course there was no answer, but Kurt made a sympathetic sound in his throat and moved further into his space. "Why don't you just stay here for a little bit."

Blaine started to respond and faltered, then started again. "And what, stare at the telegraph? I can't, I'll go crazy. I'll go see what Wes needs – "

Kurt physically held him in place with both hands. "What Wes needs is for you to relax. Forget the wire, we'll hear it if we need it. Just calm down, and talk to me."

"About what?"

"About anything. Where are you from?"

Blaine stared at him, less than an arm's length away. "I can't pretend to talk about life outside," he said quietly, shaking his head. "I can't even think about it."

"That's okay." Kurt slid Blaine's jacket back and sat on top of the desk. He gestured to Blaine, who had to lift himself up a couple inches with his palms flat on the wood. "We can talk about now," Kurt continued. "Tell me about the volunteers."

* * *

And that was how, for the better part of half an hour, Kurt talked Blaine down. That was how he learned that the volunteers had been practicing maneuvers since the autumn, and that half the men in the GPO had been locked out of work at one point or another, and that Puck lived in the tenements, and that James Connolly had been planted to gauge the crowd's response to the proclamation, and that secretly Blaine had agreed with Wes that Kurt was an idiot for wandering into the GPO that Monday morning.

Kurt pretended to be more indignant than he was at that last one. "This again? How was I supposed to know you're taking over the post office?"

"Because everyone inside had guns? We'd cleared everyone else out, you know. Civilians. Even a British soldier buying _stamps_," Blaine added, with a hint of pride.

"A soldier…" Kurt suddenly remembered something. "Weirdly tall, watched you reading on the steps four days ago? Felt you up when you ran over to their side of the street?"

Blaine saluted and assumed an exaggeratedly hackneyed accent. "Cap'n _Smythe_," he said, adding a few extra vowels. "He wasn't afraid of us, that's for sure. It was good for me to meet him that morning, I think."

Kurt raised his eyebrows.

"Not just because he let me go, yesterday. Because… well, I don't think he's in Ireland because he hates us, or because he cares if we're independent. His country just told him to come here. So he did. He was… decent." Blaine shook the thought out of his head. "Not that it changes anything. Anyway we let him go. The rising hadn't started. We didn't hurt anyone before the lines were drawn."

"How… honorable?"

Blaine shrugged. "You don't have to take us seriously. The Brits certainly don't. But my point was, when you showed up, completely out of it, we weren't _taking_ the post office. It was already taken. It's ours."

"For how long?" Kurt instantly regretted saying it, but Blaine's response was calm.

"Probably about twenty-four more hours."

"Then what?"

"Well, if the people recognize the Irish Republic, we could eventually be acknowledged at the war's peace talks. So it's what people make of it, what Dublin tells the country. We have a printing press, the one we used in Liberty Hall."

"I didn't mean _Ireland_," Kurt interrupted, narrowing his eyes. "I'm so tired of Ireland. I'm talking about _people_. You, me, everyone here. Everyone out there. You always go straight to independence and skip over whether or not you're going to make it out of this alive. Blaine," Kurt said. "I know why you're all willing to do this; I really do."

"Oh?"

"The same reason why you chose Easter."

He looked uncomfortable. "I didn't choose – "

"The same reason why James Connolly chose Easter. You think that any of you who die in here will have sacrificed something your people will … I don't know, _honor_. But what if it doesn't work out that way?"

"It will – "

"What if people only believe the papers? What if no one cares, or they're just angry their city's been shredded?"

"…Stop," Blaine said quietly.

"What if you're just consolidating everyone with the passion to change things, and then getting yourselves wiped out for nothing?"

"Stop it!" Blaine shouted, one hand cradling his head and his eyes squeezing shut. "God, Kurt, _don't_. Don't you think I'm scared?" He shook his head at nothing, as if he could forcibly will back the fear, the night, the next day, all without opening his eyes. "Don't you think I have a family?"

Kurt shut his mouth.

"I don't want to be here. But you don't understand – and that's fine, you shouldn't, how could you?" Blaine's breathing was audible. "America belongs to Americans. You won't be conscripted into the war unless the U.S. enters it. Your dad is in Congress to serve Ohio, not some other nation entirely. And hell, your state has _money_."

"I think you have an optimistic idea of how things work in the U.S.. What makes you think Ohio is such a great – "

"Because I lived there for over five years," Blaine snapped, and instantly looked sorry.

Kurt stared. Five _years?_ "When?"

Blaine's burst of fervor had subsided the second he'd said it. "Until two winters ago," he said, sounding tired. "My parents lived twenty miles outside of Columbus, in Westerville. Do you know it?"

Kurt shook his head, slowly. Knew of it, yes.

"But they moved to outer Dublin before they had me. Boy, was that a downgrade," Blaine snorted. He paused, like he might catch himself and clam up again, but Kurt waited, attentive and patient. Blaine kept going. Kurt had asked. "My mom hated it here, she said it all the time. My brother too. But my dad was making a lot of money. And of course it was all I knew. I love it."

For a moment it was easy to ignore the threat of the shelling, to listen to the pause in Blaine's story instead of the gunfire. "Coop was long gone by the time I was thirteen. My dad was making more money than ever because he'd transferred to a British firm. I was four years from Trinity, I could _feel_ it. Just walking past the gates made me happy. And then we moved to Ohio, to Westerville." Blaine stared at nothing for a moment, with eyes that bore unseeing through the claustrophobic air of the communications room, through the floor where Kurt had leaned over a dying man two days before and held his rosary.

"Why did you leave?" Kurt prompted, quietly.

Blaine shifted. "They had certain… expectations of me. Trinity, which I would have done anything to make happen. And a – a girl. Which I would have done anything to keep from happening," he added sardonically, but it came out forced. "I was thirteen, and they couldn't wait to shove us together. I never knew for sure if it was because her father worked with my father or if they were just… testing me, sort of."

Kurt didn't ask what he meant. He had a pretty good idea. And sure enough, Blaine's hands clenched and un-clenched over his lap. He felt absently at his back pockets for the proclamation, then wiped his hands over his thighs anxiously. "They'd leave us alone in the house at night. I was _thirteen_, what was I supposed to do? I was never more humiliated. She was really sweet. I hated her."

"What was her name?"

"Eleanor. Her dad is a prick…was. I guess that's a rotten thing to say, now. He figured me out before she did, and we moved. We took the money my dad had leeched out of Dublin and left. I think my parents thought transplanting me back into the States would fix me. I spent almost five years in Westerville pretending not to be gay."

_That_, Kurt thought, flew in the face of everything he thought he knew about Blaine. "You let them think they changed you?"

"Nope," Blaine shrugged. "I didn't pretend to be straight. I pretended to be nothing."

Kurt's stomach twisted at how easily he said it.

"Things were fine until I told them I wanted to come back here, to go to Trinity. Then it blew up. It was like Trinity was part of me back when I was the wrong person. It was like as long as I stayed in the States and they never saw me with any boys, they could assume I'd left who I was behind. When I got serious about coming back, they started taking the money I saved up for the trip. And my father, he… well. Started saying the things he'd kept to himself when I was younger." Blaine looked away. "Did some of the things my mom probably wouldn't let him do when I was thirteen."

Kurt wanted to touch him, desperately. "He hurt you," he observed.

"He taught me," Blaine insisted. "They couldn't keep me there. I'm glad things fell to shit. Because in the end it was about control."

His voice turned hard on the last syllable, and Kurt caught it. And suddenly something about Blaine, about the turns in his countenance and what he was even doing in a three-story GPO under siege, began to fall into place.

"They thought they owned me. But they don't. You can't just claim someone you don't love. You can't own someone you don't do right by. Legally I was a minor. But as far as I'm concerned, they lost that right to me when they pretended to do what was best for me and got it wrong."

Kurt hung onto every word, watching Blaine speak. His Irish voice was proud, and when Kurt's gaze lingered down the profile of the back of his neck and to his arms, Blaine's whole body was straight, and sure.

Blaine gestured then, at the space around them, to the GPO, to Dublin. "So here I am, I guess. Emancipated. Well," he added, "technically, I'm trapped under fire and on lock down. But this is…" His voice slipped into something emotional Kurt had only heard once, when he read the proclamation to a crowd of strangers. Only now there was no audience. "This is my _country_, you know? I know you don't want to hear about Ireland, but people here deal with way worse than rotten parents. Or they don't deal with it. Either way they can't get on a boat and leave like I did."

"I understand," Kurt said, softly. And he did. "I'm glad you told me."

Blaine was quiet at last, talked out and emotionally bared. It was the first he had sat down with Kurt without withholding something, without a nervous expectation of the next hours. The next hour was beyond their control. Kurt toed down from the mahogany desktop, stopping Blaine from following. Instead, he stood in front of him again. The more he learned…

"Blaine… can I touch you?"

Blaine's eyes darted to his and he drew a shallow breath. And the choked noise he breathed out sounded like assent.

Kurt meant to hold his shoulders, to encourage him like Blaine had Kurt all week, but his hands knew something the rest of him didn't because suddenly they were sliding in to rest on Blaine's waist.

And there it was: the full weight, the warmth of Blaine through his shirt and beneath Kurt's fingers. Kurt's head was racing, wheeling, but when Blaine's arms moved up to Kurt's shoulders, fingers clasped behind Kurt's neck, he was trembling slightly and _oh_, Kurt realized. This was new to Blaine too.

Kurt rubbed his fingers lightly up and down once, over Blaine's sweater, reassuringly – whether for Blaine's benefit or his own, he wasn't sure. All he knew was that he and Blaine were touching at four points of contact. No matter how often he'd thought he was stumbling in a haze this week, thought he could wake up back in London at any moment, Blaine was definitely real here and now. Kurt could feel the yield of his skin over firm muscle through Blaine's shirt. He was solid, he was _from_ somewhere, he had a voice and warm breath and eyes with more than one color in them.

Kurt realized he was staring, had gotten himself too close to do anything but, and he cleared his throat and looked down between them. Blaine had shifted forward where he sat on the desk and Kurt stood almost between his legs. He gave a small, forced laugh. "Your friends… they love you to death, you know."

"Uh-huh," Blaine answered, and it came out breathy. Kurt didn't take a step back when Blaine slid off the desk, forearms still behind Kurt's neck. "What did they say to you?"

"Something along the lines of 'back the hell off.'"

When Blaine gave a short laugh, Kurt could feel the contraction and relaxation of his stomach.

"Except Rachel, who I'm pretty sure wants me to seduce you."

Blaine lowered his forehead to Kurt's shoulder, not quite touching, so Kurt almost missed the heat in his cheeks. "What do _you_ want?" Blaine asked, serious.

Kurt's body tightened around Blaine on its own accord, pulling him fully into his arms and raising a hand into his hair. Somewhere in the distance, a grenade or shell found a target. Their clothes were wrinkled and covered with dirt, the communications room was muffled and grey with the residue of fighting, but their chests were finally pressed against each other and Blaine was gentle. "I want to get out of here before any more boats show up and make it impossible," Kurt said. He felt Blaine's arms flinch and begin to untangle, but Kurt held him all the more closely. "And I want you to come with me."

Blaine leaned back far enough to look at him and smiled, sadly. "That's not going to happen."

"I know," Kurt said. "I'll settle for you not getting yourself killed."

And Blaine was so small, Kurt had to duck his head to kiss him.

At first the lips beneath his were still, and Kurt felt the scare of uncertainty for the second that Blaine froze. For that second the _universe_ froze. But then Blaine made a noise, a good one, surprised and deep in his throat. And it seemed impossible but maybe, maybe he had never kissed anyone either, had never felt a boy's lips mouthing over his own. The thought gave Kurt courage, but it was nothing to the moment Blaine opened his mouth and began to kiss him back. He was _kissing him back_.

Kurt's eyes had drifted closed, reveling in the weight and taste of Blaine. But he could still feel the crook of Blaine's elbow behind his neck, his other hand cupping Kurt's face, his chest moving into Kurt's with each breath, his thigh between Kurt's, and god, his _tongue_ – Kurt didn't even realize how shamelessly wet his first kiss had become until he heard the slick noise between their mouths when Blaine pulled back a moment, only to kiss him more lightly again, with a small suck to Kurt's lower lip.

Kurt's hands had started to wander, he wasn't sure when, or where exactly, he only knew he wanted to feel but wasn't sure he could. He finally settled on cradling Blaine's head in his hands while he swept his tongue lightly over Blaine's, grasping at his hair and pressing the pads of his fingers into his scalp, which had more of an effect than Kurt expected. And when he moved back and dragged a thumb over Blaine's lips, then trailed a kiss from the corner of Blaine's mouth to his jaw, Blaine let out the smallest sound. "Kurt," he rasped against his ear, but even that fell into an inarticulate moan when Kurt pressed his closed lips to the skin beneath Blaine's jaw, just above his throat, gently tilting Blaine's head back. Blaine seemed to melt into everything at once, and Kurt did too, kissing him more slowly, almost languidly now.

And while Kurt knew there were footsteps and voices outside in the hallways, and there were walls caving in along the street, all he could hear was Blaine. Blaine breathing, the rustle of their clothes against each other and the small moans coming from one or both of them.

Somehow they were still standing, and Kurt couldn't bring himself to sit them both on the desk again because it would mean giving up an inch of contact. Finally he pulled back, took one more small kiss, and waited for Blaine to open his eyes and meet his. There was something more heated than adrenaline in them, more golden than brown. But Blaine didn't speak, only breathed out his mouth and back in again, waiting for Kurt.

"Blaine, I…" Kurt shook his head, which was still fuzzy from the feeling of Blaine's mouth, and his hands, which were still on Kurt like it was nothing, now. Kurt could barely even piece together how he was here, with this boy. How something like Blaine could just happen into Kurt's world. "I don't even…"

"It's okay," Blaine said, quieting him and smiling as they untangled. "I like you too."

Kurt's heart filled with an energy that scared and exhilarated him. But something else gnawed at him, now more than ever, and he reached for Blaine's hand. "Why did you pull away last night, on the roof? Why would you try to make me think you didn't…" Kurt swallowed. "Want this?"

Blaine's face fell, with the memory and the reminder.

"Oh, Kurt," he said, and he didn't pull his hand away. "I didn't want to." There was more.

Kurt could wait.

Blaine chewed on his bottom lip and they listened to the city outside. And while the only Dublin Kurt had known was loud and deadly, he supposed that to Blaine, every shell was an invasion, the city compromised all over again. The building trembled once and settled.

But then Blaine wasn't looking to the windows, and he couldn't have been thinking about Dublin or independence, not when his eyes bore into Kurt that deeply. He put a hand up to the side of Kurt's head, fingers in his hair above the nape of his neck. His eyes were their own apology and his voice cracked with something that was somehow akin to love and hurt.

"Of course I didn't want to pull away from you. You know that I… I want you. But I thought it was the only choice; honestly I thought it was the right thing. Because Kurt, listen to me. This _isn't going to end well_."

* * *

**A/N:** I got a couple of the sweetest reviews ever, last chapter. Thank you so much! Chapter 8 forthcoming.


	8. Chapter Eight

**Title**: Dublin Rising

**Author**: StingInTheBackground

**Genres**: Revolutionary Ireland AU, Romance, Action/Drama, Angst, Historical Fiction

* * *

**Chapter 8**

It was evening – a soft, maddeningly deceptive dusk. For almost an hour, the front rooms were quiet enough in the rotunda to perceive the fears the men had long since begun to murmur to one another. Kurt hummed something to himself purely for the sake of the sound, and looked for a room with some activity in it.

The infirmary. For all the wounded, it was still less other-worldly than the front rooms, full of men on the wait. Thank god for the girls, thank god for Blaine.

"Need any help – Blaine, is that really necessary?"

Blaine was making an empty bed - straitjacketing it, more like. He glanced over his shoulder at Kurt and shrugged. "Habit," he said, as he removed a pillowcase. It was the last one, ruined and blood-streaked; from here on out soldiers would be lucky just to get a cot. "According to my parents, in _Westerville_ people are on time, they write thank-you notes, and they definitely tuck in all the corners of the sheets." Blaine took a moment more, making up the GPO's cots cellophane-tight. "Guess it's the prickish American in me. Regrettable but there."

Kurt thought that was ridiculous. Blaine grunted slightly with the effort of securing the last sheet _as far as possible_ between the criss-cross wires of a vacated cot. "That's totally wrong," Kurt informed him. "It's so sterile, it practically screams 'death.'" A flurry of dust fell from the ceiling past Blaine's shoulders as Kurt leaned down to correct the job.

Blaine straightened and backed up, careful of the girls shuffling around them, directing one another with the additional expletives after the first new shell landed on the street. "I don't want to sound insensitive," Blaine said as the lobby down the hall came back to life, "but most of our wounded are barely conscious when we bring them in here. He won't care what it looks like."

Kurt had un-tucked one corner and folded it carefully towards the center of the cot, as if making it ready to be slid into. The shots picked back up out the front windows, and a girl hurriedly shut the infirmary door. "Blaine, we're in a hellscape. It won't hurt to make this one thing decent." Then he sat down lightly on the side of the bed and rubbed a hand over the top layer, admiring his work. "There, now doesn't this look more like a bed you'd like to sleep in?" He crossed one leg over the other and looked up at Blaine.

When a beat passed, Kurt blinked to find Blaine staring, rooted to the floor as though he'd heard or seen something Kurt missed. Whatever Blaine tried to answer the first time, he stumbled over it in a fashion that could hardly become a soldier of the Irish Republic.

"Blaine!" came Wes's voice. Blaine was saved.

Wes appeared in a rush – "I need you" – his left side covered in dirt and his officer's band tightened, re-tied, and stained with blood. Now, like the bandana on Kurt's arm, it covered a wound.

The sheets were forgotten, and Kurt and Blaine jumped up. "Are you okay?!" Blaine said, reached out a hand to touch him but didn't.

"We've got a problem."

"Wes, what – were you shot?"

"It's just shrapnel."

"Does Rachel – "

"No, and you're not going to tell her yet, understand? You too, Yank." Wes shook his head as soon as the words left his mouth, and waved an apologetic hand towards Kurt. "I'm sorry. I'm fine. Listen, Blaine, the men are saying Stephen's Green has surrendered. Have you heard anything about this?"

"No, nothing."

Wes looked a little relieved, but his expression stayed dark. "These rumors are getting out of control. It's impossible to tell which neighborhoods are actually under fire, because everyone's got a cousin they're sure was just shot in his home. Someone stopped Rachel in the middle of applying anesthetic to ask if the _pope_ had issued a statement about the civilian deaths. For the love of God."

"Hey, relax. They just need something to pass the – "

"Blaine," Wes insisted, his voice fervent, "they're starting to say we're done. They're starting to say we can't hold out." For the first time Kurt thought he saw actual fear in Wes's eyes. Guns and cannon fire were one thing, concrete and motivational in their terrifying way. But, Kurt realized, the moment the men lost faith was the moment Wes and Blaine, and everyone above and below them, truly were finished.

A man with a lop-sided posture lurched up to them and spoke without preface. "Oi, Lieutenant. We've a Volunteer just brought in, and he's got two of our bullets in him. Stomach. Dead."

Kurt and Blaine looked from him to Wes, whose brow furrowed. "Our own bullets – cross-fire? How?"

"No, sir. He come running up to the side door from his post on Prince Street, and one of our men at the window shot him. He never seen him make the sign, so he figure he'as a Brit. Else he panicked. Shot him, two bullets in the stomach." The man didn't sound repulsed, nor yet apathetic, but watched for Wes's reaction.

He cringed. "Well, put him downstairs with the rest. What was done with the man who shot him? His gun's been taken, I hope. Was he turned out?"

A pause. "Why, he was shot, sir."

We put two fingers on the bridge of his nose and exhaled. "Of course he was."

"Wretched sight too, and the men all around talking about laying down arms as it was. It true you sent that little brunette of yours to Stephen's Green to talk conditional surrender?"

"No," Wes answered vehemently, "that's not true." He dismissed him, and began to head to the hallway before stopping with a grasp on Blaine's arm. He gestured towards the man limping to the hallway of passing soldiers. "I haven't had any orders from James Connolly since the morning – I have to find him. Will you _please_ try to do something about this?"

"Where the hell is he?"

Above them, the ceiling shook once, and a consolidated crash told them a piece of the upper stories' ceiling had finally collapsed in. "You worry about the men. I'll worry about James."

"They're getting sick of me," Blaine insisted. Wes and Kurt both raised their eyebrows. "We're past my songs. I don't know more than two verses to any of them, anyway."

"You'll think of something. Listen, I have to _go_."

And he did. Blaine looked helplessly at Kurt, who raised his palms out – _well? _Blaine took a deep breath, and across the hallway to the front rooms.

* * *

Kurt felt miserably inadequate, unable to help Blaine as he pleaded with them to dig inside them and keep up the fight. " – they've got numbers, but our men know the city. Dublin fights for us. If we each take down ten of them we'll win for sure – " But the men had grown cynical, and Blaine's stirring passion only inspired a few weary nods and a couple anxious claps upon his back. The lop-shouldered man, who'd lurched back in to hear, shared pessimistic and unimpressed looks with a friend, in the back of the small gathering of men.

In a last move of desperation, Blaine pulled out his copy of the proclamation from his back pocket, thwapping it for effect. " – we've got the weight of four centuries on us, men, what's a few weeks more?" A small round of clapping went around, and at a small tremble of the building the men returned to their positions, except for the limping man and his friend, who approached Blaine. Kurt craned his neck from nearby.

"Fine job boy, say, can I have that paper?"

"Of course!" Blaine enthused, grateful and obliging, and all but shoved the document into the man's hands. "I'll get you one too," he told the friend, and was off in a hurry.

Kurt raised an eyebrow and casually moved closer. The man raised the document in farewell to Blaine, then chucked with his friend and tapped the side of his head. "Best prospect I've had all week," he declared when Blaine was out of earshot.

"What do you mean?" Kurt asked.

"This paper here. This might be worth something…" He thumped the document, and pointed to the nine or ten signatures at the bottom of the page. "When all these men are hanged."

"When all…" Kurt could barely believe he'd heard correctly. "Give me that!" he snapped, and snatched the sheet from the man's hands. The man and his friend both were surprised, and then the man snarled, shook his head like Kurt was unhinged, and he limped away.

Kurt inspected the proclamation, careful to flatten it. It had seen so much that week, it was so much the worse for wear. It was bent where it had fallen out of Blaine's safekeeping, dirty, ripped, smudged with Blaine's hurried handwriting in telegraph notes. Kurt squinted in the day's fading light, and assessed the lobby's inaction at the moment. It was quiet, so Kurt moved closer to the window, tilting the paper to the remaining sunlight. _When all these men are hanged, _the man had said. It was a treacherous notion, insensitive and inhuman… and not without its own morbid prescience. They were going to lose. Kurt's breath held as he reviewed the proclamation – _the loyal men of Ireland claim its independence… in the name of the dead generations… worthy of the destiny to which it's called._

Dimly he was aware of a low clamor reviving in the rotunda – some commotion elsewhere had put the men back on edge. Straining his eyes as the sun's rays died outside the blown-out window, Kurt continued to read, then skimmed, then his heart flopped and his stomach ached sharply as he read the signatures. There, third from the bottom, well below James Connolly and Patrick Pearse and next to Wes, he saw what he knew he'd see: M. Blaine Anderson.

Kurt closed his eyes. If they lost, if Blaine made it to their final collapse… he was a dead man along with Wes. Distant in Kurt's ears, someone raised their voice. Was Kurt trembling? It didn't matter, he had to get back to work; help Blaine while he could. A dead man. Then Kurt folded the paper back together carefully, and slid it in his own back pocket. He took a steadying breath and raised his head –

"Damn it, Kurt!"

Blaine?

A blur.

_A shot. _

Another shot, and another. So devastatingly close that Kurt skirted from the window and covered his ears on instinct, but it only muffled the sound of a gun clattering to the floor near him. A pistol. Petrified above it was Blaine.

Kurt's mind barely functioned. The GPO didn't wait for him to process; already more shots resumed and the shouts of the effort went up again. But Blaine was rigid. Unable to utter a word, Kurt followed his gaze out the window into the greying night.

Diagonally across the street, on the second floor of a partially blown-out building, the body of a red-haired British soldier was bent at the waist over a window that angled directly to face Kurt's. A slender black rifle lay askew two stories below him, fallen onto the rubbled and glass-filled street.

Kurt dimly registered the appearance of Puck, who shouldered Blaine behind the safer wall and covered the opening himself, gun at the ready. After a moment of peering from beside the window pane, at length it was clearer to Kurt than almost anything had been all week: while Kurt had idiotically read by the window's light, the soldier had aimed at him. And after all this time, Blaine shot a man.

The body twisted a bit, the arms moved – was he alive? Or was the body jerking to a still before their eyes? Both arms hung almost straight down, as if limply reaching for the sleek, fallen rifle that had not been fired, that was speckled with a deep red stream of blood that must have soaked the front of the soldier's clothes and now ran down his arms. It was pathetic, it was grotesque… oh god, "_Blaine_."

Kurt ducked beneath the window and around Puck, careful not to touch the discarded pistol, and knelt next to Blaine. He was seated, neurotically sliding his hands up and down the top of his trousers' thighs.

"Is he dead? Is he dead?"

"I don't know," Kurt answered, ignoring the look of disbelief Puck gave him. "Let's go to the back room. Or upstairs." He stood up and held a hand down to Blaine, who took it.

"I killed him, I killed him."

"Maybe not," Kurt said, and hoped Blaine couldn't feel him trembling at the thought of what had happened, and of what had _almost_ happened. "Just don't think about it." They were safely away from the front windows, but had not yet escaped the chaos of the room, when they were intercepted by a short, slight figure. The son of James Connolly. And for the first time since Kurt had arrived, the quiet boy-soldier was angry.

"What the hell was that?" he demanded of Blaine.

"Easy, Rory," Kurt said, but his pacifying tone only aggravated him further.

"Blaine, I'm talking to you. _Now _you'll pick up a gun? When your idiot boyfriend's in trouble? You won't shoot a man for Ireland, but you will for a Yank?"

Kurt stared, would never have expected the boy capable of such venom. But there was raw hurt in Rory's eyes as well. Blaine winced but didn't falter, and Kurt realized he'd expected this, expected such a reaction to the pacifist soldier's first shots, taken only on behalf of a foreigner. "He – Kurt's – his father's a congressman," Blaine said feebly. "And we need the States to take our side."

"_Congressman's son sacrifices life for Irish Republic_," Rory answered, quoting an imaginary headline. "What more could we want out of him?"

"Stop it," Blaine hissed, his eyes darting to Kurt out the side of his eyes before countering Rory directly. "Your father would never stand for that sort of thing."

Rory stepped aside to let them pass, but stopped Blaine, two slight but powerful young men staring daggers at one another. "Well you can bet Wes won't stand for what I just saw."

"He'll tell you I did the right thing."

"He'll tell _you_ that you're a coward. You should have picked up a gun and done the right thing all week. We're not here to save people, Blaine, we're here to beat an army."

"Well then you must feel pretty good about the four dozen civilians we've managed to kill along the way," Blaine retorted. But his expression betrayed his trepidation – over the dead man, over Wes's inevitable anger, over any number of things.

"That's enough," Kurt said, weary and overwhelmed. "Enough, guys. Rory, regardless of how badly you wish Blaine had let me die, the fact is he didn't. There've got to be bigger problems to deal with now."

Rory left them without answering, disappearing into the mill of soldiers as darkness snuffed out the last of the daytime. Blaine seethed as he went, but Kurt slipped his hand into his, pulled him out of the lobby, out of the way of the nighttime preparations, and steered him to the back stairwell. Upstairs they'd find a moment of quiet, they'd give Blaine the night to fully realize what he'd done. Kurt would stay up all night with him, if he had to. Already Blaine was wiping the back of his hand unceremoniously at his nose. Kurt held his other hand tightly.

The cold pistol would lie by the front windows until someone retrieved it and added it to the dwindling arsenal. That cold and horrible thing – just an inanimate object until someone, Blaine, sent its bullet bolting into the chest of another young man. Kurt shivered at the thought of the stranger he'd seen hanging over the window ledge, thick army jacket obscuring part of his red hair, limbs in visible spasm. Such a grisly end to a young man's life.

Kurt had been seconds from becoming a dangling corpse.

As they ascended the poured-concrete stairs, Blaine trembling but over-determinedly composed, Kurt raised Blaine's hand in his. And he kissed his fingers, dirt-streaked and tinged with a metallic smell – the brutal metal that saved Kurt's life.

_"Thank you."_


End file.
